


Tomorrow Never Comes

by Crystalshard



Category: Terminator - All Media Types, Tron - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fridge Horror, M/M, Swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-11-14 20:11:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crystalshard/pseuds/Crystalshard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where Sam Flynn grew up as Billy Darley, the sudden appearance of a man named Tron turns his life upside down. When he's sent to a future where a sentient program called the MCP controls the world and keeps order with its army of bio-digital programs, it's no longer a case of upside down - it's an entirely new life. </p>
<p>Tron/Terminator/Death Sentence alternate reality. No knowledge of Terminator or Death Sentence is required to read this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _There'll be no laughter, there'll be no tears  
>  When tomorrow never comes_
> 
> \- Tomorrow Never Comes, VNV Nation

The familiar click of a safety coming off was enough to freeze Billy Darley where he stood. His hands still held the half-open lid of the crate, the cruel glint of gunmetal visible amongst the bits of polystyrene packing that filled the wooden box to the brim. The sound cannoned around the dark, abandoned dock, as both his unseen opponents and his own men pulled their weapons. If the echoes weren’t tricking his ears, the other man had a lot more bodies at his disposal than he did. This was bad. 

"Put the lid down and turn around," ordered a malicious, self-satisfied voice. "And tell your boys to stand down. No funny business, Darling."

Billy knew that voice. He lowered the lid carefully, dull wood concealing the metallic gleam inside the crates, and held out a calming hand to his own gang. "Stand down. They've got us outnumbered." 

"Clever boy," sneered the voice. Billy turned, slowly, his right side hiding his hand's movement as he reached casually for the concealed gun that he carried. 

There was the sharp patter of running feet, and then a rough hand grabbed his arm and sent the gun pinwheeling away into the inky shadows. Another man gripped his other arm and swung him around to face his familiar adversary. 

"What do you want this time, Eddie?" Billy demanded, refusing to feel subdued. 

"Your dad owes my dad for that double-cross he pulled in Mexico," Edward Dillinger Jr. said evenly. Moonlight glittered off the frames of his glasses and the barrel of his gun, the inanimate intimidation of the metal dwarfed by the cold calculation in his eyes. It would be a fool who thought that Dillinger's glasses meant that he wasn't dangerous. On the contrary, Billy knew from experience that Junior was his father's lead enforcer, a superb strategist and a dead shot in almost any situation. "I'm just getting back our share of the deal." 

"Look, Eddie, this has nothing to do with you," Billy insisted. "You let me go, and I'll get Bones to talk to your dad about this. Work out a deal civilized-like, yeah?" He tried a brash grin, but it wilted under Junior's contempt. 

"This went past civilized when Bones robbed us of two million dollars." Junior jerked his head, never taking his eyes off Billy, and the two thugs holding Billy's arms dragged him forward without care for his comfort. "Plus interest." 

"Eddie, wait, what are you . . ."

"Take them out." 

The rattle of gunfire echoed around the dockyard and Billy wrenched his head around to watch. Blood sprayed over load pallets, shipping crates and containers as the bodies of Billy's men crumpled to the ground, the liquid glistening darkly where moonlight hit it. Billy didn't have time to shout a protest, his tongue numbed by the kind of casual violence that he'd thought he was immune to. 

Billy tensed, waiting for the bullet that would end his own life, but realized after a few seconds that it wasn't coming. He turned his head back and glared at Junior, whose face was still as calm as it had been before he'd given the order to wipe out Billy's gang. 

"Bones is going to hear about this," Billy threatened. 

"Of course he is." Junior appeared almost amused. "We'll see how he reacts when he finds out that we have his son in custody." 

Billy barked a disbelieving laugh. "You think I'm gonna matter that much to him? You're delusional, Eddie. The old man hates me, and I can't stand the bastard. You kill me, he'll probably thank you." 

Junior raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Either way, I've been ordered to bring you in alive." He smiled then, a smile that held no mirth at all. "Looks like you'll be needing a new employer soon. Ever thought about joining our . . . endeavor?" 

Billy spat at the ground in front of Junior's feet. "Your old man's a crook, Eddie. I'm not gonna sign on with an organization like yours." 

Junior tutted, a thin smile belied by the anger that narrowed his eyes. "And did you really think gun-running was so legitimate? A nice little family business supplying arms to those who can't obtain them otherwise? Grow up, Billy. Look at the world you're living in." He finally took his icy eyes off Billy, his body language dismissing him as being of no consequence. He beckoned over another lackey. 

Out of the corner of one eye, Billy could see a faint glow appearing behind one of the stacked shipping containers. He pretended to pay no attention, clinging to the faint hope that it might be help. At this point, he'd even be grateful to be arrested again. 

"Tie him up and put him in the van," Junior said to the lackey. He glanced back at the fuming Billy. "And gag him. I have no desire to listen to him mouthing off all the way back to . . ." 

"Hold it right there." The authority in the voice was absolute, as if the speaker knew that the only possible outcome was being obeyed. And, for a split second, it even worked on Junior. 

"Samson, Perry, Lewis, go fetch our intruder," Junior said silkily. The three men so named stepped forward, padding behind the crate that Billy had seen the glow behind. He couldn't see what was going on, but he could hear just fine.

There was a whistle of a blade through sliced air, then the meaty rip of severed flesh that no special effects department had ever got the sound of quite right, and the gurgle of a last failed breath. Shouts then, anger and surprise and panic, frantic gunshots and the _spang_ as bullets ricocheted off metal. Two more whistles, too close after each other to be the same object, two more deaths, and the organic slither of two dead bodies falling to the unforgiving concrete below them. 

Junior turned to look at Billy, the shock and rage on his face the first honest expression that Billy had ever seen on the younger Dillinger. "They yours, Billy?" he hissed, advancing, gun pointed unwaveringly at Billy' chest. "Your perimeter guards?" He raised his voice, addressing his men as well as Billy. "Because if somebody missed them, there will be _consequences._ " 

"Might be," Billy told him, grinning. They weren't, but making Junior think they were might buy him some time. 

"Call them off," Junior hissed, less than a foot away now. "Call them off, or they'll see you dead at my feet. I'm sure Dad will understand if I explain." 

"Billy?" The deep, resonant voice reassured Billy at an instinctive level. He knew this man, somehow. He trusted him. 

_. . . being bundled into the footwell of a car, the scent of leather and the feel of a blanket being draped over him by gentle hands, knowing that he has to hide . . ._

Billy ignored the whisper of memory and lifted his chin. "Yeah?" 

"Duck." 

Before he could argue that it was kinda hard to duck when he was being held upright, two blue-white blurs zipped out of the shadows and hit the two men holding him. He dropped to the ground as soon as their hands flopped loose, hoping that Junior wouldn't take the chance to eliminate him there and then. It seemed, however, that Junior had more things on his mind than Billy Darley right now. 

"Get him!" Junior screamed, firing at someone behind Billy. Billy rolled over, lifting his head from the ground to see a figure in strange black armor holding his hands up for two – discs?

The discs thumped into the stranger's hands like hi-tech boomerangs. The coreless discs were banded in the same blue-white light that traced minimal lines over the stranger's armor, their electrical hum pitched low and menacing. They should have been covered with blood, but they were as clean as if they'd been newly made. 

Billy couldn't see the stranger's eyes, concealed as they were beneath a reflective black helmet that bore a passing resemblance to an ant's head, but he could see the man's head turn in his direction and nod momentarily. Then he turned his attention to Junior and his thugs. 

Bullets pattered off the odd black armor like rain . . . and, like rain, the stranger ignored it. Instead, he sank into a half-crouch and threw the discs again. This time, though, he didn't wait for the blade-edged weapons to return – he sprang forward, rolling and twisting, turning in the air as if gravity was less of a law than a guideline. 

Billy was almost convinced that the man in the armor wouldn't step on him, but he figured that right now, the best thing he could do would be to get out of the way. Scrambling on hands and knees, he ducked behind a forklift that had apparently been abandoned for the night and looked cautiously through the driver's cab. 

The stranger was putting up a better fight than Billy had seen in his twenty-seven years, and he'd seen a lot of street fights and turf wars. He could see why Junior had mistaken one man for several. Whoever it was, he was _fast_ , inhumanly graceful, each movement flowing into the next as if he was a dancer or gymnast. He was pushing them back with every throw of those lethal discs, and Sam squinted through the dark for a glimpse of the man he was most concerned about. 

There, at the back. Junior was getting into an unmarked white van, a handful of his goons piling into the back even as Junior drove away. The rear doors flapped as the lucky few fired wildly out of the back of the van, which pulled away faster than its original design specs probably said it should. 

That still left the stranger with a couple of dozen thugs to fight. He'd stopped throwing the discs now that the fight had turned into a melee, and was holding one in each hand as if they were oddly shaped knives. True, he was mowing them down pretty steadily, but Billy couldn't sit there and do nothing. The guy had saved his neck. Billy owed him big time. 

As if in answer, Billy's knee brushed against could, rounded metal. He dragged his fascinated gaze from the one-way battle to see his own gun lying next to him. It must have ended up here when Junior's lackeys had grabbed him. 

A hard smile on his face, Billy picked the gun up and peered through the forklift cab again. The bullets had stopped now, empty guns littering the ground where men both dead and temporarily alive had dropped them. 

Billy selected a target that was trying to escape through the shipping containers and dropped him with a neat shot in his back. Unfortunately, this drew the attention of the remaining gang members, who saw a target that would be easier to kill than the indestructible man in neon and black. Half of them swarmed towards him and he began firing in earnest, every shot finding its target before he too ran out of bullets. That still left one, a slim man with no visible tattoos and a very visible knife in his hand.

The muted shriek of torn air warned Billy in enough time for him to duck. The man looked momentarily puzzled before a disc hit him in the back of the head, permanently fixing the expression of surprise on his face as he slumped over the forklift's controls. 

The man in glowing armor jogged up easily and pulled the disc out of the man's skull. "We should go," he said, the suggestion sounding more like a command. 

Usually, Billy would have resented the other man's assumption of authority, but somehow he didn't feel like arguing. "Yeah. Right. Don't want to be here when the cops arrive." He shoved the empty gun back into his concealed holster without thinking about it. "You got wheels?" 

The man's helmet tilted in what had to be a smile, a theory that was proved correct when Billy heard the laughter in his voice. "Yes. I have wheels." 

Sam found his Ducati and his bike helmet undamaged and right where he'd left them, although the huddle of motorcycles that must have belonged to Dillinger's people definitely hadn't been there earlier. He pulled his helmet on and started his machine, reveling in its low growl, then looked over to the other man. The stranger was sitting astride a Kawasaki Ninja, and Billy nodded in appreciation. It suddenly occurred to him that he didn't even know who this guy was. "Hey, what's your name?" 

The man had done something to his armor, damping down the light so that the stripes looked more like glow-in-the-dark strips than something alien and uncanny. The discs were somehow layered together and attached to his back, looking more like modern art instead of the deadly weapons that Billy knew them to be. As the Ninja purred to life, the man straddling it looked up, staring straight at Billy. 

"My name is Tron. Follow me if you want to survive."

The faint wail of sirens in the distance silenced Billy's half-formed protest, and he grudgingly flipped down his visor and followed Tron as the other man kicked his bike into gear and raced away. "Tron? What kind of a name is Tron?" he grumbled quietly behind the concealment of his helmet. "And 'come with me if you want to survive'? What kind of bad action movies has this guy been watching, anyway?"


	2. Chapter 2

They pulled up far across town from Billy's usual territory, in an area where he didn't know the streets. The feeling of being on someone else's turf was an itch between his shoulderblades that he couldn't scratch, tension making him jump at every little sound. Around him were old brick buildings that had an empty, abandoned feeling, as if this part of the city had been forgotten about. A dead neon sign hung above the doorway of the building on the corner, proclaiming 'FLYNN'S' in dull brown letters. 

Tron parked his bike on the sidewalk and Billy followed suit, removing his helmet as he killed the Ducati's engine. "Why're we here, Tron?" Billy said, sharper than he'd intended. 

Tron's helmet retracted into his collar, like the kind of freaky CGI special effect you get in sci-fi movies, only real. The face revealed underneath was remarkably handsome, cool blue-steel eyes under thick brown hair, with a nose so straight you could lay a ruler along it and see no air gaps. "There's something you need to see, Sam," Tron said gently. 

Billy wished he hadn't switched the engine off now. "Whoa, wait. My name's Billy Darley, not Sam. I don't know who this Sam is. Look, I appreciate the rescue and all, but you've got the wrong guy." 

Tron shook his head, and the utter certainty in his face unnerved Billy. "Your name is Sam Flynn, son of Kevin Flynn. Your father was murdered when you were six years old. Your father's friend Alan Bradley hid you with Bones Darley to protect you." 

_. . . a face, Tron's face, worn and worried, lit by a computer screen . . ._

Billy blinked. "That was you! You're Alan." 

Tron shook his head. "No. It's a long story, and part of what you have to learn in there." Tron nodded towards the building, and Billy was suddenly seized with an intense reluctance to go inside. He might not like his current life much, but at least he knew who he was. If he went in there, he might end up being someone completely different. 

Billy shook his head. "No way. No fucking way, man. Look, it's been nice meeting you, but I gotta go." 

Iron fingers gripped his elbow, and Billy blinked up at Tron. How the fuck did the man move that fast? Two seconds ago, he'd been sitting on his bike as if he was part of it, and now he was looming over Billy with an intent look. His armor was glowing again, the lines of light vivid against the shadowed dark. "Sam, if you walk away now, you'll die. It might not be tonight, or tomorrow, but you'll die, and you'll never know why." 

"Are you threatening me?" Billy demanded, trying to wrench his arm out of Tron's grip. The man was as immovable as a statue.

"No threats, Sam. I'm here to protect you." 

Billy snarled up at Tron. "Stop calling me that! My name is Billy Darley. I've always been Billy Darley." 

"You've been Billy Darley since you were six," Tron said implacably. "Before your father's death, you were Sam Flynn." 

Billy seethed, but couldn't help asking the next question. "So what happens if I do go in there and listen to whatever bullshit you've got to tell me?" 

A faint smile flickered at the edges of Tron's mouth. "You'll probably still die, but at least you'll know why. Oh, and you'll have the chance to save the world." 

Unwillingly, Billy smiled back. "Yeah. Okay. I'd rather know who's after me." 

Tron released his elbow, and Billy held back from rubbing it by an act of will. Tron was at the double doors now, unlocking them with a set of keys that Billy would have sworn he hadn't had room for under that clinging bodysuit. Tron guided his bike inside, apparently trusting that Billy would follow him. It occurred to Billy that he could leave, leave all this crazy talk, leave this weird guy in the glowing armor and get back to – 

_Get back to what?_ asked his own tired voice, a side of himself that he tried to ignore. _Back to gun running, drug dealing, being told you're stupid and useless and unwanted and that he doesn't know why he bothers to feed you when you're not worth it? Back to the life that trapped you in the first place?_

Billy had rolled his bike through the door before he'd thought about it twice, looking around with interest. It was an old games arcade, the hulking machines covered in clear dusty plastic. Tron's Kawasaki was leaning against one of the consoles, and Billy parked the Ducati in the next aisle over. 

_Clunk._

Overhead, round yellow lights came on reluctantly, as if they were tired and unwilling to do their jobs after being inactive for so many years. The games blinked to life, squalling electronic blips and beeps in his ears before the jukebox began blaring a song that must have been interrupted decades ago. 

_"Some day, love will find you, break those chains that bind you . . ."_

Movement caught Billy's eye, and he saw Tron stepping away from the fuse box and towards a game at the back of the arcade. 

_Space Paranoids._

The name, the shape, the lights . . . all of these blended together in Billy's memories, and he walked forward as if hypnotized. Pushing past Tron, he laid one hand flat on the console. "I used to play this with my dad," he said quietly. "We'd play doubles. He said . . . he said it was all in the wrist." 

Tron nodded, eyes shadowed. Without saying anything, he pushed at the console, and Billy stared as it swung out on hidden hinges to reveal a narrow passageway. Suddenly, the crazy talk had an extra dimension of reality. 

"What the fuck?" Billy breathed. 

"Follow me, Sam Flynn," Tron said, stepping into the narrow gap and kneeling smoothly to retrieve an old flashlight that Billy hadn't noticed. To Billy's poorly concealed amazement, it still worked. 

The passage led down to a set of stone steps, and below that was an old door that looked as if it belonged in the eighteenth century. To one side of the tightly shut door was something much more modern, a blank glossy black pad just slightly larger than a piece of A5 paper with a tiny speaker above it. 

Tron laid his palm on the device, and it lit up the same blue as his armor. "Identity confirmed. Welcome back, Tron." The voice was female, sweetly sexy with a hint of old telephone line. 

"Hello, Gem," Tron said conversationally. 

"Second person detected," Gem announced. "Please place your hand on the touchpad." 

With a sideways glance at Tron, Billy reached forward and mimicked Tron's gesture. 

"Identity confirmed. Welcome back, Sam Flynn." 

"Uh, hi, Gem," Billy said with an awkwardness he hadn't felt in years. The door clicked open in front of him, hanging invitingly ajar. 

"After you, Sam," Tron said mildly. 

Billy pushed the door open, looking around. A desk of the same glossy black material as the ID scanner was situated at the far side of the room, with a green-lit digital clock on its surface counting steadily upwards. Shelves and tables and a surprisingly clean couch were set against the other walls, and in the middle of the room, a weird-looking gun with cables attached to it was standing on spindly tripod legs. Its muzzle pointed at an odd blank spot on the wall, dusty footprints leading away from it but not towards it. 

"Who's Gem?" Billy asked, more to break the odd, waiting silence than from any desire to know. 

"Gem is the guardian program that makes sure this place doesn't get disturbed," Tron said, his flashlight sweeping over a bookshelf at the back of the room. "If she hadn't recognized you, the pad would have hit you with a thousand volts and enough amps to kill you three times over." 

"I can see why you didn't tell me that earlier," Billy said, grimacing, his hand flexing unconsciously. 

Tron plucked an old tape reel from the bookshelf and hooked it into an equally ancient projector, hands nimbly feeding the tape through. 

Up against the far wall, just above the huge black touchscreen, a wavering and faded picture flickered into view. The video had clearly been recorded in this same room, the décor all but identical. 

"Sam. Hello. In case you don't remember me, I'm Alan Bradley." The face was the same as the one in his memory, Tron's twin but for the glasses and the careworn expression. "I was a friend of your father's. We worked at ENCOM together, before the MCP's coup – no, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself." Alan sighed, tilting his head in a way that the young man watching recognized as identical to one of his own gestures. "I don't know how much Tron has told you, or if you've even met him yet, so I'd better start at the beginning.

"Back in '82, before you were born, three of us broke into the ENCOM building. That was Kevin, your father; Lora, the woman I married; and me. We were after proof that a man called Ed Dillinger had stolen Kevin's game programs and put his own name on them. What we found was much worse." Alan pushed his glasses back up his nose. "Thing is, Dillinger wasn't so bad a programmer in his own right. Back in the day, he'd written a chess program that was capable of learning from the moves that you made against it. He called it the MCP – the Mnemonic Chess Program. That night, Flynn discovered that Dillinger's program had grown beyond its original parameters. It was absorbing other programs, harvesting their coding and using it for its own purposes. It was smarter than Dillinger had dreamed. A lot smarter." 

Gem spoke up then, the crackly quality telling Sam that the words were coming from the tape. "Warning. Perimeter breach. ETA twenty minutes." 

"Thank you, Gem," Alan said, his inflection identical to the way that Tron had greeted the program earlier. "As I was saying, the MCP had evolved. It called itself the Master Control Program now, and booted the three of us out of the system before we could even begin to find Kevin's proof." Alan looked grim. "It cost Lora and I our jobs – Kevin had been fired months ago, when Dillinger originally stole his games. But we did learn that the MCP thought it could run this world far more efficiently than we humans could. 

"We did what we could. We hacked in from outside, found a few weaknesses, dropped a few spanners in the works to slow it down. It found our weaknesses, too. When it killed your mother – they said that it was a faulty traffic signal, but none of us believed that – Kevin nearly gave up.

"There were two things that kept him going. One was you, Sam. The other was the laser that's in the middle of this room. 

"It was originally Lora's project. She had to leave the prototype back at ENCOM, but she copied the plans and smuggled them out. We spent years building it, testing it, refining it. It's ten times more accurate than the original." Alan glanced downward, regret in every line of him. "I wish your father had lived to see it completed." He shook his head, the image glitching and fuzzing as the old projector clicked onwards. "That laser does two things, and it requires a DNA unlock to get it working – one of Lora's ideas. She figured that if only she, your father and I were able to access its functions, it'd be safer. When your father died, we substituted you.

"The first is that it's a time travel device. That only takes one set of DNA coding to unlock, and the unlock is permanent. Both Lora and I have done that already. Now, as long as the laser exists in the future and has power, you'll be able to go forward and back between times." 

_Time travel?_ Sam wasn't sure he believed his ears. It sounded too fantastic, too unbelievable to be true. 

"The second function requires all three DNA imprints, and . . ." 

"Alan!" Another woman's voice, this one only vaguely familiar to Sam. "We have to go. I've set up the back-up laser system upstairs – with any luck, they'll believe it's the only one. The MCP's people will be here in less than ten minutes." 

"Coming, Lora!" Alan called in response. He looked back at the screen. "I'll have to let Tron tell you the rest. But before I go, remember this. Set the target date on the laser to March 17th, 2029, and the time delay to fifteen seconds. Step in front of the laser. When you get to the other side, the touchscreen should be showing a palmprint symbol. Make sure the laser aperture is clear, and touch it." Alan nodded once. "Goodbye, Sam. And good luck." 

Alan got up and went behind the camera, disappearing from view. A few seconds later, the projector stopped.


	3. Chapter 3

"He _what?_ " Dillinger asked his son, staying calm only through a supreme act of will. 

_"He got away, Dad. We had him cornered, I was about to bring him in, and suddenly some fucking nutcase with bulletproof LED armor started carving up my boys with these weird hi-tech Frisbees. We barely got away."_

"Language, Ed," Dillinger said evenly as he resisted the urge to swear a blue streak that would put Junior to shame. The lights in his office flickered for a moment, then steadied. 

Junior sensibly let that one slide. _"What are we gonna do, Dad?"_

"You're going to give me a good description of this protector that young Darley seems to have acquired. After that, you don't need to know." 

There was a few seconds of silence. _"Yes, sir,"_ Junior bit off, and the sound in Dillinger's ear changed to the dial tone.

"Kids," Dillinger muttered as he put the phone down, the lights flickering again and going out for a few seconds. He lifted his chin slightly, unaware that he was doing so, and addressed the empty room. "Do we need to upgrade the generators again?" 

"WE MAY NEED TO UPGRADE OUR SCIENTISTS," the MCP grumbled. 

"Ah. Jarvis?" Dillinger asked, an amused smile twitching at the edge of his lips. 

"YES. THE LASER TEST WAS A FAILURE AGAIN." 

Dillinger shook his head in frustration. "I don't understand what's going wrong. You've gone over the control system hundreds of times –"

"ONE MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND AND FORTY-NINE TIMES."

"– yes. As have Jarvis and I, although perhaps not quite so many times. It should work." 

"UNFORTUNATELY, IT DOESN'T." 

"You could always use the old ENCOM laser instead," Dillinger suggested. "I can have it pulled out of storage."

"NO. THE RESOLUTION OF THE OLD LASER ISN'T HIGH ENOUGH. IF OUR PLANS ARE TO SUCCEED, WE HAVE TO USE THIS ONE. I JUST NEED TO FIND THE PROBLEM." 

"Well then, Master C, maybe you should ask the person who created it," Dillinger suggested. His eyes moved to the view of the city outside his huge office window, focusing on the old ENCOM tower that bulked against the distant skyline. It was obsolete now, all of its functions transferred to the new, purpose-built Dillinger Systems building that he was sitting in. The old building had been converted into apartments, housing some of his best people . . . and one very special prisoner. 

"THERE'S A SIXTY-EIGHT POINT SEVEN NINE PERCENT CHANCE YOU'RE RIGHT." 

"Cute," Dillinger muttered to himself. 

"END OF LINE." 

* * *

Looking out of her unbreakable window, Lora could see the red-edged glare of the Dillinger building across town. The view filled her days, haunted her nights, the curtains too thin to block out the ever-present glow. She'd hated that view for years. 

It was a little ironic, she'd thought, that she ended up imprisoned in the same building that she used to work in. True, the old ENCOM building had changed out of all recognition, but it was still the same place where everything had started. And while the single apartment was supplied with everything necessary to meet her physical needs, the comfortable cell was still undeniably a cell. 

Her intangible needs were a little more difficult to deal with. 

Lora turned away from the window, firmly pulling the curtains closed, trying to ignore the insistent patch of red glowing through the fabric. With the lights on, it was easy enough. She shed her dressing gown and crept into the double bed, the subtle cruelty of the MCP supplying such a piece of furniture not lost on her. Even after twenty years, the left side of the bed was still Alan's. 

Lora turned her face away from the window and closed her eyes, the last memory she had of her husband replaying its bittersweet comfort. 

_Alan joined her in the secondary laser lab – the room that had once been Kevin's apartment above the arcade – just as she finished setting up the power cables, the laser humming quietly with the banked power in the circuits. It was as real as the primary laser concealed deep beneath their feet, with the same capabilities and programming. There was only one difference._

_This one wasn't activated. If anyone tried to use it, they'd fail. Lora wouldn't say that the gene lock was unbreakable, but with any luck, the MCP wouldn't know what to look for. It was technology far beyond their own time, something they'd found waiting for them when they'd first tested the time travel capabilities of the laser. Gem had never answered when they'd asked how the scanners had got there._

_"Ready to go?" Alan asked._

_She glanced up at him, seeing the permanent furrows that worry had worn into his brow. "Very ready," she confirmed._

_"Good. We . . ."_

_The sharp sound of shattering glass came from downstairs, followed by the thud of the doors being flung back. They shared one shocked glance, Lora seeing her own fear echoed in Alan's eyes._

_"The back exit, hurry!" Alan said, grabbing her hand and pulling her towards the door. They hadn't managed more than two steps before the door was kicked in so hard that one hinge tore away from the door frame, letting a stream of heavily-armed black-masked men flow into the limited floor space that wasn't taken up with benches or server racks._

_They were followed in by a familiar figure, incongruously clad in a sharp business suit._

_"Dillinger," Alan growled, his hand on hers tightening. "I was wondering when you'd show up."_

_"Hello, Mr. Bradley," Dillinger replied disinterestedly. "And Mrs. Bradley, of course. So this is what you've been getting up to? Very interesting." He approached the laser, and Alan shifted next to her, as if prepared to do something. The clicking of safeties coming off rattled around the room in an uneven cannon, and Lora swallowed as she looked down the shadowed barrel of a rifle._

_"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Dillinger recommended, not turning away from the laser. "If my men think you're about to do something . . . unfortunate, they have orders to shoot your lovely wife. I hate to resort to threats, but what can you do?"_

_Alan froze, and she could almost hear him thinking, his mind racing ahead at breakneck speed. "You're not going to kill us, Dillinger. You need both of us if you really want to get this laser working, and there's no way I'm going to cooperate if you shoot Lora."_

_"Same here," Lora managed, tearing her eyes away from the gun and glaring at Dillinger. "If you think I'm going to help you for one second if you kill Alan, you've got another think coming."_

_Alan squeezed her hand, and Lora squeezed back, taking comfort in his steady warmth. She looked up at him, only to find him tracking Dillinger's movements intently. Behind his back, she caught a twitch of movement out of the corner of her eye, and she suddenly figured out his plan. Behind them, disguised as a monitor, was the DNA scanner that would let him access the laser controls. He could disintegrate Dillinger and his black-clad muscle squad and throw them into a different time, give himself and Lora a chance to escape while the organization was still reeling from the loss of its head. She moved slightly sideways, blocking the glow of the pad and deliberately attracting the attention of the men with the guns in the hope that they'd pay attention to her and not Alan._

_It worked, and she stared challengingly at them, anger finally overtaking the fear. Beside her, she could feel Alan shift a little to access the keyboard, could hear the soft clicking as he blindly typed in the commands the laser required._

_The grip on her hand loosened slightly, and she echoed it, reading Alan's intention._ Be ready to move.

_"Hey, hold it!" came a sudden shout._

_Freed from the need to hide their actions, Lora was pushed sideways by Alan. She fell to the floor, looking up to see Alan lean back and reach for the return key._

_He never got the chance._

_A half-dozen bullets slammed into his chest, making him jerk abruptly and then fall limply onto the work bench that held the computer controller for the laser. His open eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, a warm, living, breathing man transformed in seconds to something still and eternally cold._

_Lora howled out her rage and loss, lunging for the keyboard, no longer caring if she lived or not. Damn Dillinger and the MCP, they'd get nothing from_ her!

_An iron hand clamped around her wrist, tight enough to leave bruises. Snarling, she flung out her other hand, only to have it grabbed as well._

_"Oh dear." There was a faint flicker of genuine regret in Dillinger's voice as his minions moved aside to let him through. "Such a pity. I had hoped to recruit you both."_

_Lora glared at him with hate-filled eyes, struggling against her black-clad captor. "Don't even think about it," she snarled. "You might as well kill me now, because I'm never going to help you."_

_Dillinger shook his head sadly. "Lora, my dear, I do hope you change your mind." He raised his voice to a carrying pitch. "Take her away – and don't hurt her unless you have to. Call my techs in. I suspect that the MCP will want all this back at ENCOM." He looked down with distaste at Alan's body. "And have somebody clean this mess up."_

"LORA." 

Lora's eyes slammed open, the memory shattering at the sound of her captor's voice.


	4. Chapter 4

"So let me get this straight." Sam was pacing back and forth across the room, deliberately avoiding looking at the laser. It wasn't helping – with every step, the room was becoming more and more familiar. 

Over there was the couch where he'd slept on the nights that Alan and Lora and a vague, fuzzy form that he knew to be his dad (his _real_ dad, and the relief that he wasn't related to Bones Darley would have been overwhelming if his head hadn't been spinning so much already) had been working late. _There_ was the cupboard where he'd kept his bike (and he didn't dare look inside right now). And _here_ was the little computer that he'd learned to write his first programs on . . . 

Sam shook his head, reorienting himself in the here and now. ""You're a – what did you call it?" 

"A bio-digital life form," Tron said patiently, sitting straight-backed on the couch and looking as if he was prepared to leap into action given half a second's notice. Those sleek muscles were relaxed under the formfitting black armor, but the pose revealed the coiled power in his frame. 

"Right, yeah, one of those. So from what you're saying, I have to go into the future, to the point where you've finished your digital evolution, and let the machine read my DNA so that the laser can write you into reality? And I have to do this because I've already done it?" 

"How else do you think I knew when and where to find you?" Tron asked simply. "It wasn't coincidence, Sam. I knew where you'd be." 

Sam turned his head away from Tron, but that only brought the laser into his view. "This is insane." 

"Before you decide it's insane, or impossible, or anything else, why not try it?" Tron suggested. "If you're right, it won't work and nothing will change. If I'm right . . . well, we don't have to stay in the future too long. We can send me back and then return ourselves." 

Sam stopped pacing and looked back at Tron. "We?" 

"Surely you didn't think I'd let you go alone?" Tron asked, a faint smile curling at the edges of his mouth. "Alan-1 created me to protect you. I'm not letting you out of my sight now." 

Okay, that was enough. "I can take care of myself just fine, thanks," Sam snapped. 

"Yes, because you were doing so well with those people who wanted to shoot you," Tron fired back, a sudden flare of temper that Sam hadn't expected in a – a _program_.

"Dillinger wouldn't have shot me, or weren't you there for that bit?" Sam yelled. "He wanted me alive for something, and –" Sam stopped, arrested by Tron's suddenly frozen expression. 

"That was Edward Dillinger?" Tron asked urgently, all traces of his anger wiped away as if they'd never existed. 

"Ed Dillinger Junior, yeah," Sam said, confusion cooling his own rage. 

Tron looked like he was thinking fast. "Then it's worse than I thought. Sam, we have to go forward now. If Dillinger's traced us here . . ." 

And finally, _finally_ , Sam's brain started to put the pieces together. If the man who'd created the MCP, who'd forced his family into hiding and killed his mother, wanted him for some reason, then it couldn't be good. "He knows I'm Sam Flynn," Sam said, unaware that he'd just accepted his own true identity with those words. "That's why he wants me." 

Sam raced for the desk interface, brushing the dust aside and typing commands into a system that was at once familiar and confusing. Date set – time delay set – run. 

Tron was already standing in front of the laser as Gem began her countdown. "Digitization in fifteen . . . fourteen . . . thirteen . . ." 

Sam joined Tron, still not sure what the hell was going on but knowing that he preferred the uncertainty to whatever Dillinger had in mind for him. "So what's the future like?" he asked, trying for casual and failing utterly. 

". . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . ."

Tron shrugged. "I don't know. I wasn't there long enough to find out." 

". . . three . . . two . . ."

Sam shot him an incredulous look.

". . . zero. Digitization in progress." 

The world went white. 

* * *

For a moment, Sam thought that nothing had changed. Then he saw the changed quality of the light through the windows, no longer the soft gold of the streetlights but a harsh white that threw what little was visible of the room into stark relief. It was dustier, too, the console that he'd swept clean only seconds before now shrouded in fine gray particles again. He could see the thinner layer where he'd moved the dust, making him stare at his sleeve where a silvery sheen still lingered over the black leather. 

Beneath the dust, just as Alan had said, a hand outlined in green light was blinking steadily. Sam exchanged a look with Tron, and the man – program – bio-whatever – nodded back reassuringly. 

Sam sat hesitantly in the chair, clearing the dust away robotically. He kept going even when it was cleaner than it had been in forty years, somehow unwilling to stop and face up to the next step.

"Sam." 

A hand lit with lines of blue light reached out from behind him and pressed against his arm, stopping it from moving. Sam exhaled, suddenly aware of the warmth emanating from the figure standing behind him. Tron wasn't touching him except at that one point, but he could feel it nonetheless. 

"Protecting me, huh? Even from myself?" Sam asked roughly. 

"Even from yourself," Tron said gently, withdrawing his hand from Sam's arm. "I'll always be here for you, Sam." 

"Yeah, well, that's what my dad probably thought too. Don't make promises you can't keep." 

Then, determinedly, Sam pressed his palm against the glowing shape. 

A faint whine met his ears, and he twisted around to see the laser's mouth glowing brighter and brighter. A shining figure began to appear by the wall, featureless at first and then coming into sharper and sharper resolution as the laser drew the shape of a man in pure light. This was Tron being born into the world, forty years of digital evolution coming together to create a being that was more than human. The glare grew blinding for a moment and then faded slowly, shadow and color filling in the familiar black armor. 

Blinking light-dazzled eyes in an attempt to clear away the afterimages, Sam looked back and forth between his Tron and the new one. Were it not for the fact that the second Tron was wearing his helmet, Sam doubted that he'd have been able to tell the difference. The two Trons stood face to face, the older one talking urgently and the younger nodding on cue. Sam couldn't hear much, as Tron's voice was too low to carry far. He did hear the words 'motorcycle', 'tape', 'Sam Flynn' and 'docks', and what sounded like directions. 

Finally, the Tron who had been talking clapped his counterpart on the shoulder and they both turned to look at Sam. The silent Tron studied him carefully, as if memorizing his face – which, come to think of it, was probably exactly what he was doing. The other was wearing a pleased smile that almost bordered on smug. "Sam, can you send him back to about two hours before we left?" he asked. 

"Yeah. Sure. No problem," Sam said, a little uncomfortable under the combined scrutiny of the two Trons. He turned his back gratefully and began keying in the sequence that would send the younger Tron back to his own time. His memories were coming back faster now, guiding his fingers as he typed. It was easier now that he'd remembered what the relevant commands did, and the system was soon ready. 

"If you could, uh . . ." He waved at the area that served as a landing pad, hoping that the gesture would get his meaning across. One of the Trons nodded and stepped into place, while the other prudently got out of the way. 

Sam was ready for the flare of light this time, and was relieved when he looked up to see only one Tron in the room with him. If he'd thought Tron had smiled before, that was nothing compared to the infectious grin that Sam couldn't help returning. 

"So, that was weird," Sam said with a feigned attempt at nonchalance. "Can we not do that ever again?" 

Tron laughed. "What do you think about doing a little exploring?" he asked, sidestepping Sam's question. " I didn't get much of a look last time." 

Sam smiled again at Tron's enthusiasm. "Sure. Why not?" he agreed. He was curious about this future, and he was fairly sure that between them, he and Tron could get out of any trouble. 

The two made their way upstairs. The Space Paranoids machine didn't want to move for Sam, the hinges having rusted over the intervening decades, but budged protestingly when Tron shoved it aside. 

Outside, the world was very different. It was still night, but the city had changed almost out of recognition. There were no more streetlights – instead, neon white strips edged the buildings, all of which seemed to have been coated in some sort of glassy black substance. The streets were all but empty, but those few passers-by that Sam managed to spot were dressed in something similar to Tron's outfit. Sam exchanged glances with the program, and Tron shrugged. 

A huge black motorcycle swept past, its chassis lit up in lines of orange light, and Sam stepped out into the street in fascination. He watched as it disappeared into the distance, only half-aware of Tron's perpetual presence by his side.

_Light._

It was like staring into a spotlight, like looking at the laser as it worked, the size of the former and the intensity of the latter. Sam instinctively shielded his eyes with his arm, staring up at a strange hovering craft that looked like two pillars with a bridge between them. It looked too unwieldy to fly, and yet somehow it was managing the feat. 

More distant memories nagged at him. Vague recollections of a tank rolling around the screen, shooting at these odd craft that he half-recognized . . . That was it. A Recognizer. But if the vehicles of his childhood memories were Recognizers, then this was the sports car version of them. Orange light limned elegant lines, more real and broadcasting far more danger than the 8-bit graphics on Space Paranoids. 

The Recognizer landed, the bridge sliding down until it was at street level. Three orange-clad figures stepped forward, two helmeted guards and one man who looked oddly familiar. 

"Hey!" Sam called aggressively. "You want something, huh?" 

The trio approached, and the man in the middle smiled. There was no warmth in that expression at all. "Hello, Sam Flynn. Welcome to the future."


	5. Chapter 5

" _Dillinger,_ " Sam breathed, recognizing Junior's father. 

Dillinger's cold smile stayed on his lips. "Not quite."He surveyed Sam with the disinterested expression of a teacher who'd found that his pupil was not up to standard. "My name is Sark. Remember it, if your puny human brain can manage that feat." He nodded to the guards. 

A blur of blue-edged black stepped between Sam and Sark. "Sam, go!" Tron insisted, discs humming in his hands. 

Sam's first instinct was to do as Tron said, and save his own skin. His second, born out of a combination of the responsibility he felt for his gang (and since when was Tron one of his?) and a strange new disinclination to leave Tron to fight alone, was the exact opposite. 

_Fuck that. I'm not running away from this one._ Sam reached for the firearm by his side, keeping one eye on Tron and the other on Sark and his goons. Tron was crouched in a defensive posture, discs lighting up both hands. Sark drew his own disc from his back, as did his two guards . . . and then the guards backed off, one to either side. Sam watched them suspiciously, gun level and steady in his hand as Tron and Sark faced each other. The two stood unmoving, both poised for action like runners listening for the starting gun. 

It wasn't a starting gun that broke the silence, but the rip of air as the two guards hurled their discs at Tron. Tron flipped out of the way, throwing one of his discs while in mid-air at the suddenly advancing guards, then coming to rest in a wide-legged crouch. Sam scrambled back in a far less dignified fashion to avoid the rebounding orange discs, aiming his gun at one of the faceless armored guards and pulling the trigger. 

The gun clicked emptily, reminding him too late that he'd already used up the bullets. Sam swore, glancing down at the gun for a brief second. Then there was an instant of déjà vu as hands grabbed his arms and pulled them painfully far back, locking his wrists together with a strength that Sam couldn't pull free of. He tried anyway, knowing he'd have bruises later and not caring as he struggled futilely against what seemed to be less a man than a steel wall. Sam kept hold of the gun this time, but it did him no good. 

A blue-black blur caught his eye as Tron landed after what must have been another acrobatic stunt, the program's disc returning to his hand as if magnetized. Off to one side, the body of the black-clad guard lay crumpled on the pavement, and despite his current circumstances Sam felt a tiny surge of triumph. He met Tron's gaze, their eyes locking for a moment, and Sam could see the tense determination in the other man's face. 

Tron shifted in preparation for freeing Sam – 

– and an orange-lit hand slammed into the empty disc dock on Tron's back. Tron's face went blank, and he froze for a moment before collapsing at Sark's feet. His discs dropped from his hands and hit the ground with twin ringing noises, spinning like fallen plates. 

Sark sheathed his own disc and bent to pick up Tron's, examining them with amused disdain. The discs went dead in Sark's hands, losing their blue glow. Sam redoubled his efforts to free himself, seeing only Tron's limp, apparently lifeless body. "You bastard," he growled. "You killed him!" 

"He isn't dead, bit-brain," Sark said with an edge of contempt. "He's in standby mode. He'll reboot in an hour – maybe two, given that he's such a primitive model." 

Sark nodded to the guard, and Sam was hit with another surge of déjà vu. The last time he'd been in this position, Tron had leapt out of nowhere and sent Junior's gang packing. But Tron was on the ground this time, his wide and empty eyes making him look disturbingly dead. 

Sark kicked Tron in the shoulder, the impact rolling Tron onto his front. Then Dillinger's orange-lit doppelganger slotted Tron's discs back together and clipped them back into place, twisting them into place with a controlled viciousness that Sam recognized as being something he'd demonstrated himself on occasion. Seen from this side, he didn't like it. 

The silent guard manhandled Sam onto the Recognizer and shoved him into place against the rear bulkhead. Something that looked like clear plastic exuded from the floor and engulfed his feet, effectively locking him in place as the guard moved out of arm's reach and fell into an at-ease pose. At least his arms were free now. He holstered the gun that he'd hung onto grimly through all his attempts at fighting, hating the utter indifference shown by Sark and the guard to a weapon that usually commanded obedience. 

Sark stepped on board moments later, dragging Tron by the collar and dropping him unceremoniously on the deck. Sam forgot for a moment that he was tethered and tried to step forward, nearly falling over as his weight shifted in preparation for a movement that he was unable to complete. Sark looked at him and smirked, and Sam snarled under his breath, glaring at his captor. When he got out of here, Sark was dead meat. 

The bridge of the Recognizer slid back up the legs of the impossible vehicle, and then the whole structure shuddered as it took to the air once more. Sometime during the fight, the spotlight had cut off, and Sam could see the city spread out beneath him. The arcade was right in front of him now, the 'FLYNN'S' sign barely visible in the short-range glow of white neon. 

Sark nodded to his surviving henchman. "Destroy it." 

"What the fuck?" Sam's mind raced, repeating over and over, _No, no, not the laser, I can't be stuck here, this can't be happening._ "Wait, stop!" 

His protests went apparently unheard as a bolt of yellow plasma surged out of the top of the Recognizer. It expanded as it went, burning through bricks and metal with the roaring _crump_ of ignited air, tearing apart the structure of the arcade in the space of a few frantic heartbeats. It carried on, down to the hidden basement, melted games machines tumbling downwards in the heart of the fire. Sam couldn't see the laser go up, but he knew that it was there. 

After a few moments, the plasma ball faded out. The superheated crater that had been left behind glowed cherry-red for several seconds, then dimmed slowly as Sam watched. Shocked and numb, he didn't even bother to lift his head as the Recognizer moved away. 

The smoking hole where the Arcade used to be was not the only ugly gap in the changed city. Some of the buildings that he knew were still there, but were now coated in that strange, glossy, neon-lined black. Others had vanished completely, the Recognizer's shadow sweeping over steel and concrete rubble as the craft glided through the air. There was something familiar about the area of shattered glass and broken brick that they were over now, in fact. Sam gasped at the well-known shape of the sign that lay, dusty and damaged but mostly intact, among the wreckage. 

_ENCOM._

For the first time, Sam looked up and ahead. A tower loomed against the horizon, sable black against the dark blue-gray of the skies and edged in neon red. Around it was a wide, flat circle of land that must have been at least a mile across, covered in slowly creeping dots of orange light. It looked mechanical, uninviting, and Sam was suddenly sure that he didn't want to go anywhere near that tower. 

Unfortunately, Sam's sudden desire to be anywhere but heading for the tower had no effect on the Recognizer or its pilot. Even as Sam's apprehension grew, the tower came closer. 

The largest of the orange dots resolved themselves into Recognizers, stacking neatly on the ground. He could see one or two tiny dots of blue among the scattered orange clouds and, reminded, his eyes went almost automatically to Tron. Tron hadn't moved from the loose-limbed and uncomfortable-looking tangle he'd fallen into when Sark had dumped him on the deck, his eyes still open and unseeing. 

Sam dragged his eyes back up to the horizon, unable to look at Tron for too long. The angular lines at the top of the building were now close enough for them to resolve into words. 

_Dillinger Systems._

"Just in case I hadn't guessed, huh?" Sam muttered to himself, the mild mockery making him feel a little more like himself again. 

On the ground, among the huge outlines of the Recognizers and the slow-moving dots that had to be people, fast-moving orange blurs zipped everywhere between the tower and the border of the . . . landing area? Kill zone? Both? Sam shook his head, trying to work out what the blurs were. Then the memory of that illuminated motorcycle brought them into focus. Sam was seized by the sudden desire to own one of those bikes. 

As the Recognizer came in to land near the edge of the cluster of identical-looking machines, a group of bikes and something that looked like a two-seater Formula One racecar broke away from their dizzying, arbitrary courses and headed purposefully towards them. 

Sark frowned, but didn't manage to get more than, "That's not . . ." out before a blue disc screamed out of nowhere and sliced his head open. Sark's eyes went as blank as Tron's and he fell gently forward, collapsing over the controls. The Recognizer wobbled and then fell the last few feet to the ground with a thud, rocking backwards and forward in the shock of the abrupt landing. Off to one side, there was a softer thump as the guard collapsed as well. 

_Damn it, that was my kill!_ Sam thought, inexplicably annoyed at losing his opportunity for revenge on Sark. 

The bikes and the car had made it to the Recognizer now, the orange fading to blue. The car had stopped, while the bikes swirled around it in a constantly-shifting pattern that made it impossible to count them. 

Another disc slammed into the glassy stuff holding his feet down, shattering it. Sam's first act was to lift Tron in a fireman's carry, grunting a little at the weight. Tron was heavier than he'd thought. 

The hatch on the car popped open, revealing a figure in a suit of blue-lined black and a helmet. "Get in," the figure said, voice so mechanically distorted that Sam couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. 

Sam wasn't about to turn down an opportunity to get out of here. He staggered down the ramp that had automatically extruded when they'd reached the ground, and made his way towards the car. Then, suddenly, he hesitated. What if this was a trap?

" _Get in,_ " the figure repeated impatiently.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The marks on Sam that Quorra refers to are a set of tattoos that Billy had in Death Sentence. While this Sam looks mostly like Legacy!Sam, he's still got Billy's tattoos.

If this was a trap, it was too complex for him. Either way, there was a chance of getting away from the tower, and that had to be a good thing. 

Instead of climbing into the car, Sam eased Tron's unconscious body into the seat next to the driver. He – she? – nodded sharply in acknowledgement, and Sam stepped back to avoid the hatch as it closed. Tyres squealed, and the car was suddenly a hundred meters away, its course traced by rising dust clouds. 

Sam watched it go for a moment, but his attention was quickly diverted when one of those gorgeous bikes pulled up in front of him. Its rider was less than a foot away, suggesting that the man – definitely a man, even with the helmet obscuring his face – had a significant amount of practice with this particular vehicle. 

The part of the motorcycle that was curved over the man's spine folded away, forming into the back of a second seat. "Hurry!" the man urged, his voice as distorted as the driver of the car. 

Sam wasn't going to wait to be asked twice this time. He jumped onto the back of the bike and grabbed the rider around the waist, barely getting a solid grip before the bike was in motion. Around them paced several of the blue-lit bikes, giving Sam the disconcerting feeling that he was back with his own gang, in 2010.

The differences, however, outnumbered the similarities. These weren't his streets that they were racing through now, the clothing alien to him, the bikes faster and more powerful. The speed was as exhilarating as he'd imagined, the acceleration quite literally stealing his breath. Ducking his head behind the other man's helmet, Sam tried to breathe normally. 

"Hang on," the man said. Sam risked a look around to see orange bikes catching up with them, and fast. His savior cursed. "Not enough time to get to the edge of the city. Radia, Ophelia, we need some cover." 

Two of the blue bikes peeled away, and Sam turned his face back to the wind that was causing his eyes to stream. "What are they doing?" he yelled. 

"Buying us time," the rider replied grimly. "I hope it's enough." 

Sam had just enough time to think about that statement before the buildings ahead of them lit up in a reflected flash. It was bright enough to make him blink, and judging by the crashing noises behind them, direct exposure to the flash grenade must have been even worse. 

A hissing noise followed, and Sam glanced back to see smoke filling the streets behind them. A single blue bike charged out of the smoke and fell back into formation, but no orange bikes followed her. 

The man in front of Sam clearly had some arcane means of telling the universally-helmeted gang apart, because he asked, "Where's Ophelia?" 

The blue rider who'd emerged from the smoke looked over at them for a split second. There must have been some kind of comm. system inside the helmets, because it seemed as if Sam's rescuer was listening to something. Then his shoulders sagged. 

"I'm Ram, by the way," the man in front said abruptly. 

"Uh, hi," Sam said, taken off guard. "I'm B – Sam." 

Silence greeted that statement – no, not silence. From behind him, the roar of engines buzzed through the air, and Ram tensed. Each of the blue- and white-lit figures drew a disc from their backs, then peeled apart like a sea parting for a prophet. Ram leaned even further into his bike and somehow sped up, the wind-blast deafening Sam as they outstripped the rest of the bikes. Ahead of them, in the distance, he could see the vague shape of that odd off-road Formula 1 car. 

Then Ram flung the bike sideways, somehow keeping control as orange discs whined past them. Sam was suddenly glad that he had such a tight grip on Ram. As the orange discs curved around to return to their owners, Ram straightened out the skid and continued to pour on the power. They flicked around corners and along streets with such haste that Sam could have sworn the bike was doing ninety-degree turns on occasion. 

"Where are we –"

"Shut up and hold on," Ram snapped. 

Another few corners, running alone now, with only the growl of the orange bikes behind them. Then there was empty space as the city abruptly terminated, road becoming bare earth in a sharply demarcated line. Sam risked another look behind them. The orange bikes were slowing, pausing at the line that divided city from country. 

"They're stopping!" Sam shouted in Ram's ear. 

"Their vehicles aren't designed to go off-road," Ram replied, his attention clearly more on his driving than on the man behind him. "Once we're clear of the city, we're safe. The Recognizers are too slow to catch us up." 

Sam thought about this for a while, eyes on the slowly brightening horizon and the car that they were slowly gaining on. One by one, the rest of the blue bikes caught up with them, Ram falling naturally into place as the leader of the formation. Sam took to studying the bikers as false dawn seeped over the landscape, and finally decided that the key to telling the riders apart was in the patterns of light on their clothes. 

False dawn gave way to true dawn, and gave him his first look at the lifeless, rocky terrain that they were racing over. It was nothing like the California that Sam remembered, not even like the desert that they must be heading east into. 

"What happened here?" he called over the growl of the wind and the electric hum of the bikes. 

"You don't know?" was Ram's incredulous response. 

"I'm . . . kinda new here," Sam said, hoping that the half-truth would pass muster. 

There was silence for a few minutes. "We're nearly there," Ram said eventually. "You can ask Q." 

"Who's Q?" Sam asked, though he wasn't sure why he bothered. He didn't know any of these people anyway. 

As it happened, Ram didn't answer. 

* * *

The sun was up by the time the gang had finished weaving their way through what Sam had belatedly recognized as the mountains surrounding Death Valley. He was thoroughly lost by now, and starting to sweat under the warmth of the rising sun, his shirt clinging uncomfortably to his back and his black leather jacket absorbing more heat than was comfortable. He wondered how the black-clad bikers were managing – they didn't seem bothered by the temperatures at all. 

Ram led the group down a long tunnel that Sam didn't see until they were nearly in it, then pulled over in what appeared to be a natural cavern. Sam straightened up, wincing as his back complained but grateful for the relative coolness of the cave. The car was parked in front of them, hatch up, and Sam could see Tron still unconscious in the front seat. 

Climbing off the bike, he went over to the car to check on Tron. Sam reached out tentatively to check his pulse, relieved to find that the program-made-flesh actually had one. The soft skin of his throat, what little was revealed by the high collar, was warm against Sam's hand. 

Sam turned back to Ram and the riders, shedding his jacket as he did so. "Hey, guys. So, uh, thanks for the resc – _uh!_ " 

Sam found himself slammed back against the car, a helmeted figure looming over him with his? – her? – no, definitely her – disc humming at his throat. Sam froze, remembering all too vividly how razor-sharp the edges of those discs were. He thought he vaguely recognized the pattern as belonging to the driver of the car. 

"What game are you playing?" she hissed, voice less distorted than it had been earlier. "What's Dillinger planning? I should have guessed he'd send a program sympathizer in sooner or later." 

"Wait, what?" Sam asked, apprehension making his throat tighten, the sound coming out as something akin to a squeak. "Program sympathizer? I . . ." 

"The circuit lines on your arms? Your neck? You didn't even try to cover them up. How stupid does Dillinger think we are?" 

"Look, I'm not . . ." 

One moment ago, Tron had been staring blankly at the wall. Now, he had his discs drawn, helmet up, one disc at the back of Sam's captor's neck and the other held between himself and the rest of the group. "What's going on?" he rumbled, making no effort to disguise the threat in his tone. 

There were whispers in the background, nonsense words as far as Sam was concerned. Rinzler? What was a Rinzler? 

The woman holding her disc at Sam's neck tensed. "You brought a Rinzler into my base?" 

"I don't know what a Rinzler is!" Sam yelled, exasperated. "I don't know what the fuck is going on! You know, it'd be really nice if people stopped abducting me and trying to fucking kill me!" 

There was a ringing silence after that declaration. 

A tall, curly-haired man stepped forward, and Sam recognized Ram's voice. The electronic overlay he'd used earlier hadn't changed it that much. "He said his name was Sam, Q."

The woman – Q – stilled. Sam couldn't tell what she was thinking through the helmet. "Is that true?" 

"His name is Sam Flynn," Tron said, before Sam could reply. 

The mutterings rose in volume again, and Sam swallowed. "Uh, Tron, I don't think that helped," Sam said, just loud enough for Tron to hear him. 

Q's reply to Tron's statement radiated anger. " _Flynn?_ A program sympathizer claims the name Flynn? Nice try." 

Sam's fists clenched uselessly. "It's my real name! Check my – oh." His ID would be of no use, bearing the name William Darley as it did. "C'mon, there's gotta be some kind of test you can do to prove it." 

"We've got Sam Flynn's DNA on file in the Flynn Lives archives," Ram suggested. "We can check that easily enough." His eyes narrowed with suspicion as he regarded Sam. "It'll be interesting. Flynn, if he's still alive, should be coming up on his fifties." 

"You always were good with numbers, Ram." Q's voice held layers of amusement, affection, and an underlying distrust of the interlopers in her base. "And if it doesn't, we'll have another disc we can reprogram for our own uses." 

Q's disc deactivated, the glowing edge winking out as she slowly pulled it away. "You had better hope that test comes out positive, because right now that's the only thing keeping you both alive," she told Sam. It wasn't a threat; it was a simple statement of fact. 

Tron allowed Q to step away, then re-sheathed his discs. He caught Sam's eye, and Sam nodded. For now, it was best to go along with this. He trusted Tron – if Tron said he was Sam Flynn, then he was Sam Flynn. He even remembered being Sam. The test would be positive, and they'd be okay, and maybe he'd finally get some answers. 

It didn't mean he had to like it, however. Sam was getting very tired of being hustled away by people. At least the little cave they'd been thrown in had bedrolls and sleeping bags on the floor, even if the door was made of iron bars and lockable from the outside. And somebody had provided breakfast. 

Sam wasn't sure what breakfast actually _was_ , but it was edible. Tron made no comments on the food, other than to say that he couldn't taste any poisons or drugs. 

Then, once his growling stomach had been silenced, Sam could hear the one of the sleeping bags calling him. Dully, he remembered that he'd been up all night. _Hell, I've been awake for nearly twenty years._ He'd have laughed, if his energy levels hadn't just dropped to somewhere in the negative numbers. Sam wriggled into one of the bags, finding it surprisingly cozy. 

His last sight, before his eyes closed, was of Tron standing at parade rest. Guarding him.


	7. Chapter 7

The light above their heads buzzed and flickered fitfully as Quorra sat down and rested her hands on the rickety folding table in front of her. Four hours sleep hadn't been enough, but it was probably all she was going to get for a while. 

Around the table sat the handful of people that Quorra relied on to keep the Resistance running. To her right sat Ram, her second-in command. Quorra sometimes thought that his organizational skill was the only thing keeping them going – and his upbeat nature the only thing keeping _her_ going. Next to him was Shaddox, the man in charge of training new recruits and the fighter who'd been part of the Resistance since Judgment Day. 

At the other end of the table, facing her, Gibson lounged in his chair as if he was at a party instead of a meeting. His ever-present hood was thrown back, revealing a face too young for the lines that strain and weariness had etched into it. His grin was the same sardonic expression that he'd always worn, though, and he was still the best surgeon that they had. 

To his right, seated opposite Shaddox, Radia sat rigidly upright. Quorra quietly ignored the red eyes and the tear-tracks that still stained her lovely face, knowing that Radia would prefer it that way. They all knew that every time they went out, some of them wouldn't come back. Radia was Ram's equivalent for the civilian population of the caves – a population that outnumbered the fighters and was growing by the week. 

In the last of the six seats, directly to her left, was Jalen. Jalen was a superb strategist and tactician, and the one that Quorra relied on to figure out the details of her strikes. He'd been the one who'd planned most of the recovery mission that they'd just returned from – the recovery mission that had been thrown into chaos by the arrival of the man who called himself Sam Flynn and the Rinzler that accompanied him. 

"The good news is, we rescued Ama from the MCP," Quorra said bluntly. She didn't have to mention the captured fighter they hadn't been able to save – she could see the shadow in everyone's eyes. Especially Jalen's. 

"If he's lucky, he's dead," Jalen said harshly. No-one at the table disagreed. Everyone knew the story of Jalen's capture by the MCP – in fact, most of them had been involved in the rescue. It had taken a long time for Jalen to heal well enough, mentally and physically, to return to the fight. Quorra considered it a minor miracle that he now sat at her side. 

"And the bad news?" Shaddox rumbled quietly. 

Quorra took a deep breath. "The bad news is, we lost Ophelia and Danny." Pretending not to see Radia's furious blinking as the woman held back tears by main force of will, she hurried on. "We also picked up a pair of potentially dangerous strays."

"I've heard that Sam Flynn is in the caves," Radia said, her voice unnaturally controlled. "I also heard that he brought a Rinzler with him." 

Quorra frowned. "There's something very odd going on with those two," she said reluctantly. "The Rinzler isn't acting like a normal Rinzler –"

"Not trying to kill us, you man?" Shaddox quipped.

Quorra nodded. "Exactly. It didn't kill me." She'd shared a car with that – that _thing_ , that program, and believed it to be human until the moment it had been revealed to be a Rinzler. She'd never seen a Rinzler's face before. "It could have, and I'd have never seen it coming." In her mind, she replayed that incredible leap again. It had gone from statue-like stillness to moving threat, nothing in between. She'd known Rinzlers were fast, but it had still been extraordinary to see. "It let me go when I stopped threatening Sam. And it talks." 

"It talks?" Jalen wasn't the only one looking surprised. "Rinzlers don't talk." 

"This one does," Ram confirmed. "And it's blue. Like us." He looked around at the green-lit Gibson and Jalen, and the white glow of Quorra and Radia, and amended, "Well, some of us." 

"That does not mean a great deal," Radia said, pushing her arm forward on the table. Orange washed across it as she concentrated, and was then replaced by her normal white. "You know how easy it is to disguise circuit lines." 

Quorra coughed, regaining the attention of her people. "As for Flynn - we were expecting Sam Flynn to be in his late forties, someone who'd come to us and offer salvation from the MCP. The Flynn we have is twenty years too young, appears to know nothing about the MCP, and is tattooed like a program sympathizer." 

Jalen's hands, which had been lying lax on the bare plywood table, clenched into fists at this. Quorra patted him absently on the wrist and he relaxed again, though his stillness gave away his continued tension. 

Ram intervened at that point. "We – well, Gibson – ran some tests against the archived DNA we have on file. Gibson?" 

Gibson leaned forward, suddenly all business. "Going purely by the DNA evidence, there's a 99.9% chance that this really is Sam Flynn. Problem is, there's a few anomalies. First, like you said, he's twenty years too young. I checked the telomeres on his chromosomes and anything else that might tell me his real age, but it adds up to him genuinely being in his late twenties. I also checked for any signs that he's a clone. If he is, it's been covered up better than I can find it. I'd bet my disc that he's human." 

"What about the other anomalies?" Ram asked. 

"While I didn't find evidence that he'd been cloned, I did find tiny amounts of cell damage that correspond with having been digitized. The pattern is similar to that which we've found on newly made programs, before their bodies begin to repair the damage." 

Quorra blinked, trying to process that information. "What about the Rinzler?" 

Gibson relaxed slightly. "Definitely a program, no mistaking it. Very new, as well – can't be more than a day old. It's got the same digitization errors as Sam, in addition to its creation damage. It's as if it was made, then zapped into the computer and spat back out again." He frowned again. "It's not exactly a Rinzler, though. It's similar to the Rinzlers, but not identical. The digital DNA is a lot more dense. There are things in there that I've seen in no other program." 

"This program wouldn't have been called Tron by any chance, would it?" 

Quorra looked up sharply at the man leaning against the rock wall of the tunnel that joined on to the strategy room. "Roy? What are you doing here?" 

Ram's grandfather smiled and walked forward slowly. Roy was might have been in his seventies, but his mind was as healthy and sharp as ever. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for his joints, his arthritis exacerbated by living in the cool, damp cave network that played host to this group of survivors. 

Ram jumped up and guided his grandfather to his seat at the table, then lifted another of the folding chairs from the pile stacked haphazardly at the back of the cave. Flicking it open, he squeezed into one of the remaining gaps between the chairs. Roy watched fondly, then turned his attention to Quorra. "Well?" 

Quorra re-ran the memory in her head. _'Tron, I don't think that helped.'_ "That's what Sam called it," she said warily. 

Roy smiled. "Tron was the name of the program that Alan Bradley created to protect Sam," he said, ostensibly to Quorra but loud enough for the entire table to hear him. "Alan wrote him first, before there were Sarks or Rinzlers or Black Guards. According to the Flynn Lives archives, Tron was due to finish evolving sometime around now. Of course, it's hard to keep track of the calendar down here, but I'd say that it's almost to the day." 

Jalen snorted. "Flynn Lives. The prophecy that Sam Flynn will return and help us destroy the MCP. It's a legend based on nothing but hope." 

"It's a legend that's sitting in our caves right now, with the same program that Alan made," Roy snapped, the rebuke clear in his gentle voice. Jalen suddenly found the table fascinating. "You're all so busy plotting to take down the MCP that you've forgotten what's in the Archives. Well, I haven't. You've probably even forgotten the first function of the laser." 

"I thought its first function was to bring programs out of the computer and make them flesh," Gibson said tentatively. 

"That's the second function." Roy was more animated now than Quorra had seen him in years. "Its first is that it's a _time travel device_. It could easily have brought Sam through from the past." 

Judging by the faces around the table, Quorra wasn't the only one skeptical of that claim. "Even if time travel were possible, the only laser we know of belongs to the MCP," Radia said doubtfully. "And if the MCP has this capacity, why not send its soldiers back and conquer the past as well?" 

"Oh, something about stable time loops, I never did listen when Lora was talking ninety miles an hour at me. I'm just a programmer. The point is, there's a second laser in the basement of Flynn's arcade, and it's connected to the computer that Tron evolved in." 

"There _was_ a laser," Shaddox said, almost apologetically. "The arcade was destroyed by a Recognizer just after a Sark captured Sam and the Rin – ah, Tron." 

Roy went pale, the color change noticeable even with the cave-pallor that marked many of the non-fighters. "Destroyed?" 

"Full report, please, Shaddox," Quorra said briskly. 

Shaddox nodded sharply, almost militarily. "My team and I were running surveillance in the city. One of my outriders alerted me that there had been a power surge in the vicinity of Flynn's arcade, so I went to investigate. By the time I got there, there were two people standing outside the open door. I went past them on my bike, but I didn't recognize either of them, despite the fact that one was dressed like one of our people." 

"Tron," Roy said, certainty in his voice. 

Shaddox tilted his head in acknowledgement. "Perhaps. By the time I circled back around, a Recognizer had appeared. It landed in front of Sam and . . . and Tron. They didn't even try to run." _Idiots,_ his tone suggested. "A Sark came forward with two Black Guards and said something to Sam, I didn't hear what. Tron tried to protect Sam – it killed one of the Guards before Sark shut it down." He frowned. "I've never seen that move used before, but it knocked Tron out completely. Then again, we've always used discs to kill programs – taking one on hand-to-hand is suicidally stupid." 

"What about the arcade?" Roy insisted. 

The big man shrugged. "After the Sark and the surviving Guard hauled Sam and Tron aboard, they used the Recognizer to destroy the arcade. There's nothing left but a crater." 

Roy stared at the table for a moment, hands trembling. "I'd like to talk to Sam," he said eventually, looking up at Quorra. 

"That's crazy!" Ram protested. "Granddad, you've never seen what a Rinzler can do. What if it broke out and took you hostage? We've got no guarantee that Sam Flynn, if it's really him and not a clever copy, is even on our side!" 

"Exactly," Radia agreed. "If he is marked like a program sympathizer, who is to say he is not a program sympathizer? This could be a trap set by the MCP." 

"You're forgetting things again," Roy told them. "I _knew_ Sam when he was a boy. He might even remember me. Anyway, I'm old and harmless and he might talk more freely in front of me than one of you big scary fighter types." He waved a hand in vague explanation. "And I'm expendable." 

This statement brought a chorus of protest, not only from Ram but from everyone at the table. 

Roy waited for the noise to die down, then smiled. "All right. There'll be a guard watching them, won't there? I'm sure he or she can protect me as well." 

Reluctantly, Quorra nodded. Roy's arguments made sense, and there wasn't much in this situation that _did_. They needed answers, quickly. "All right. Go talk to him. If anyone has a problem with it, send them to me." 

Ram looked rebellious, but said nothing as his grandfather smiled. 

"Thank you, Q," Roy said, getting up out of the chair and waving off any offers of assistance. "No, no. I'm not that crippled yet." 

The group watched in silence as Roy made his slow way back down the tunnel. 

Quorra tapped on the table, making a few people jump. "Now, is there anything else we need to talk about?" 

There was a pause while the other five collected their thoughts, and then Radia spoke up. "The first groups have been moved to the new cave complex that we discovered. They have found another water source, but other supplies are still problematic. Especially medicines." 

"Hey, I sent what I could spare," Gibson objected. 

"That reminds me," Ram said, obviously wanting to head off a potential argument between the two powerful personalities. "How's Ama doing?" 

The surgeon's eyes hardened at the mention of the woman they'd rescued. "She's recovering," he said. "It's a good thing we got to her before she reached the Tower." 

There was an uncomfortable silence. 

"Speaking of which, we picked up two more discs during the rescue," Jalen said into the silence. "A Sark and a Black Guard. Giles has them now, he's beginning the wipe process. The Rinzler disc that he's been working on is nearly ready for use." 

"Excellent," Shaddox said in satisfaction. "We can recruit a few more people. There's one or two that I've been keeping my eye on." 

Three new discs; three people lost. It seemed to sum up how their war was going – the Resistance never gaining ground, but somehow managing to hold their own. Stalemate, always stalemate. 

"Two of the team we sent out yesterday also managed to steal five lightcycle batons. If we keep going at this rate, we'll have a comfortable surplus." Jalen looked pleased with this, and Quorra shared the sentiment. Extra lightcycles meant that she could send people out with spares. She'd lost too many people to derezzed lightcycles, and this might just make the difference. 

"Okay. Anything else?" Quorra asked. Receiving only silence, she nodded. "Good work, everybody. Jalen, we need to talk later about another raid on the farmlands." 

Jalen nodded, unsurprised. The pitiful state of the storerooms was something they fought as constantly as the MCP and its programs, and at just as much of an impasse. 

"Dismissed," Quorra said to the table at large. Shaddox was the first to leave, his stride as confident as ever. He was followed by closely by Jalen, the tall strategist catching up with Shaddox and starting a quiet conversation before they rounded a bend in the tunnel and were gone. 

Radia didn't move, staring blankly into space, her face working behind her glazed eyes as if she wasn't _there_ at all, but some other place, in some other time. 

Quorra exchanged a glace with Gibson, and the man nodded. Going around to Radia's chair, he said gently, "Radia?" 

Radia snapped back from wherever she'd been, sense returning to her eyes. Quorra could almost see the shields go up as Radia tried to compose herself. "Yes?" 

"I'd like to talk to you about those issues with the medical supplies," Gibson said, doing an admirable job of keeping the sympathy out of his voice.

Radia nodded, looking grateful, and Quorra knew that while it might start out as a discussion of medical supplies, it would end with Radia crying on Gibson's shoulder. Radia stood and walked out of the room side by side with the surgeon, leaving Quorra and Ram alone. 

The moment they were out of sight, Quorra dropped her head and closed her eyes, succumbing to exhaustion for a few precious moments. She heard the scrape of wood on stone as Ram pushed his chair back, and a couple of footfalls as he moved behind her back. 

Warm hands rested gently on her shoulders for a moment before knowledgeable fingers tracked along the hidden seams of her armor. The neck and shoulder pieces detached neatly, and she could hear the clicks as Ram set them on the table. Then his fingers were pushing aside the bodysuit and digging into tense muscle, and Quorra moaned in relief. 

"Roy was right," she murmured. "When you brought me here and I learned about the Flynn Lives archives, I really believed in the legend. I must have gone through every file in the database. When years passed and nothing happened, I . . . forgot. Surviving day-to-day was more important than some vague prophecy." 

Ram made a soft, interrogative hum, his fingers never ceasing in their efforts to find and ease every knot in her abused muscles. Quorra sighed and leaned back into his hands. 

"If Roy's guess is correct, and who we have down there are really Sam Flynn and Tron . . ." 

She was silent for a while as Ram loosened her shoulders for her. "If they are?" Ram prompted. 

"I think I'm disappointed," Quorra admitted. "They're not the ones from the legend." 

Ram gave her neck a final rub and went to sit down again, pulling his chair close and leaning an elbow on the table. "Maybe no-one could ever match up to the legends," he said thoughtfully. "We built them up so high that we forgot they were based on real people." 

"Yes, exactly. Flynn – he's just human." 

Ram chuckled. "Q, we're all 'just human'." 

Quorra nodded, glad of Ram's pragmatism. He always knew how to bring her back down to earth. "Tron isn't, though," she said suddenly. "It looks like a Rinzler, but Roy said that it was coded long before the Rinzlers came into existence." 

Ram frowned, absently unhooking his disc from his back and spinning it idly around one finger as he thought aloud. "If Tron was created first, then the Rinzlers must have come from it, instead of Tron being a reprogrammed Rinzler the way I assumed. The only place that the MCP could've got the code from is the computer in the arcade." He flipped his disc into his hand and held it still, staring at it. "Which means that the MCP knew about the laser all along." 

Quorra's mind raced, taking the theory one step further. "So the trap isn't for us – it was for Sam. The MCP's been waiting for him. It must want him alive, or it would have destroyed the arcade years ago." 

She couldn’t think of a reason why the MCP would want Sam alive, and the creases in Ram's forehead told her that he couldn't think of one either. There was something nagging at her, though, some vague thought that refused to coalesce. Something to do with Sam and – Gibson?

Ram's voice, laden with mischief, pulled her out of her thoughts. "So by rescuing him, we just threw a spanner in the works." He slotted his disc back into place smoothly as he spoke, clearly delighted by the idea.

Slowly, Quorra smiled. "I like doing that." 

Ram grinned back at her. "Me too."

Quorra leaned forward, not taking her eyes off Ram's face. He mirrored her, something deeper and hotter than simple playfulness in his expression now. "I think we're alone," she whispered teasingly. 

"I think you're right," he murmured in response, closing the gap and meeting her lips. Desperation, passion, love, need, feelings that she sensed and reflected back to him through the kiss in a feedback loop of desire. Her hands slid to the seams of his armor, peeling away the pieces and letting them fall to the floor. 

The need for air made them break apart, but Ram's mouth immediately latched onto her bare shoulder and Quorra moaned in pleasure, bringing one hand up to twine in his curly hair. Her other hand slid behind his back to trace the circuit lines on his disc, and Ram shuddered at the sensation. 

As if in revenge, Ram reached around for her disc and caressed it, and Quorra gasped aloud as his touch sparked heat down her spine. He pulled back, kiss-red lips parted slightly. "Q, not so loud. People will hear us." 

"Let them," Quorra replied, and pulled Ram down to the floor.


	8. Chapter 8

The first time Sam woke up, it was to a soft thump. 

He rolled over inside his sleeping bag to see the crumpled form of Tron sat uncomfortably on the floor. The program was sprawled against the wall, limbs lax, and snoring gently. Sam couldn't help but smile at the sight as he wriggled out of the enclosing fabric and went over to the sleeping man. Evidently, whatever 'standby mode' was, it wasn't the equivalent of sleep. 

"Tron. Hey, c'mon over here. You'll be more comfortable lying down." He tugged at Tron's shoulder, hoping he'd wake up long enough to move. Tron had been difficult enough to lift when Sam had been thrumming with adrenaline – he'd be even more of a problem now. 

Tron's eyes snapped open, and the world turned upside down. At least, from Sam's perspective. There was a blur of motion, a moment of speed, and the impact of his chest against the stone floor of the cave. Sam's wrist was held in a tight grip by the man that was now standing over him, keeping Sam's arm pointed up at the ceiling. Twisting his head sideways, he could see that the blue-lined guard on the other side of the barred door - _do they all have those helmets?_ \- had his disc out and was waiting for a cue. 

"Sam?" Tron sounded bewildered. "Did you put me in standby?" 

Sam's wrist was instantly released, and he rolled over and sat up. He massaged his wrist, seeing the guard relax and replace his disc on his back. Dismissing the guard from his thoughts, Sam turned his attention to Tron. "No. You fell asleep." 

Tron blinked and sat down beside him, his face going blank as he processed the information. Then, suddenly, he relaxed. "If no threat is present on activation, then I'm meant to sleep for eight hours to let my body stabilize. Else – ah, _otherwise_ – I go to override programming intended to neutralize any threat to you or me." 

Sam nodded, enlightened. "So when you came out of emergency mode, you passed out." A short bark of laughter emerged from his chest. "Geez. We really screwed up your processes, didn't we?" 

"Just a bit," Tron said dryly. 

It wasn't that funny, but Sam couldn't help it – he laughed aloud, joined after a few moments by his fellow captive. After the craziness of the last few hours, it was good to laugh. They subsided after a while, and Sam patted the spare sleeping bag. "If you're gonna sleep, you better do it horizontally. C'mon." 

Tron watched as Sam zipped himself back into the greenish-brown bag, then tucked himself into his own. Then it was Sam's turn to watch as Tron closed his eyes and appeared to drop instantly into slumber. 

Snuggling down into his sleeping bag, Sam deliberately turned his back on Tron. "Why is it that every time I'm in jail, my cell-mate snores?" he muttered to himself. 

* * *

The second time Sam woke up, it was to the scrape of a chair. 

"Huh?" Sam mumbled, sitting up and trying to get a fix on reality. Beside him, Tron breathed easily, curled on his side and facing away from Sam, as if even in his sleep he was trying to guard him. 

"Hi, Sam," said the person sitting on the chair outside the cell. "Oh, I nearly forgot. Do you mind if Anon stays with us?" From the gesture, Sam interpreted that to mean that the guard's name was Anon. 

The man on the chair had white, curly hair and a face that was seamed with age behind thick glasses. His voice was kindly, almost identical to Ram's, and Sam frowned at a nagging sense of familiarity that seemed to have nothing to do with his physical resemblance to the younger man. The chair was a simple plastic affair that had seen much better days, and in a surreal moment Sam realized that it had once served as garden furniture. 

"Not at all," Sam said mock-cheerfully. "We're pals, right, Anon?" Anon said nothing. "He's real talkative," Sam confided to the older man. 

"We found Anon in the middle of the desert, half delirious from thirst," said the white-haired man. "We don't know much, but we think he escaped from the MCP. He hasn't said a word to anyone since we found him." The creases on his face deepened as he smiled up affectionately at the hovering Anon. "He manages to make himself understood, though." 

Anon cocked his head slightly on one side and nodded at the man in the chair, then resumed his guard stance. 

"Well, there you go," the man said, as if Anon had said something comprehensible. 

Sam shook his head, trying to realign reality into something he could cope with. "Look, I don't know what you're here for, but you need to tell me what's going on around here." 

"Why don't you tell me what you do know so that I can tell where the gaps are?" the old man suggested. From anyone else, that would have been a challenge, but somehow it didn't come across that way. It was a kindly uncle, of the sort he'd never had, trying to help him out. _Never?_ asked a tiny part of his brain. 

Sam opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was no way that the words, 'I used a laser to travel through time,' weren't going to sound insane. 

"Why don't I start you off?" the as-yet unnamed man asked, smiling as if he was sharing a secret with Sam. _No, I know his name, I'm sure I do._ "Let's see, how old are you? Mid-twenties?" 

"Why do you care?" Sam snapped quietly, conscious that Tron was still asleep behind him. 

The old man met his eyes. "Despite what Darley may have taught you, some people _do_ care about others. Now, how old are you?" 

"Twenty-seven," Sam growled reluctantly. 

"Twenty-seven. Right, you were born in . . . so that would make it . . . and Tron was . . . hmm, okay." 

Sam was getting exasperated with him. _Ram? No, not Ram. Ron? No . . ._ "Will you stop being so fucking cryptic?" 

Roy shot him a look, and Sam remembered that expression always coming before a half-hearted attempt at disapproval. The disappointment had always been a more effective deterrent than the words, and he still flinched under it, even twenty years on. 

"Sorry, Roy," Sam muttered, and found to his surprise that he meant it. 

Roy's face lit up, the lines of it deepening as he grinned. "You – you remember me?" he asked, and Sam saw the hope that he'd been hiding until that moment. He was a little surprised at himself, as well. He'd tried hard to bury his pre-Billy memories over the years, the contrast between the kindness he remembered and the reality of indifference too painful for him to want to recall. 

"Sure. I think so, anyway." Sam's memories were vague, and it was really more impressions than memories. Waving at Roy's video camera, then having Roy slot the smaller cartridge into the VHS-tape-shaped carrier that would let him play the recording on the video player. Roy handing him a red balloon at an amusement park. The air-freshener smell of Roy's old car. Roy showing him the best way to get toys out of the grab machines. And it was the sheer _contrast_ between those old memories and the life he'd known as Billy Darley that made him believe those memories were true. He couldn't have made up something like that if he'd tried. 

"Good! That makes it much easier." Roy leaned forward slightly. "Okay, I'm guessing here, so tell me if I get it right. A man called Tron found you and told you that your name was Sam Flynn. One way or another, he got you to come to Flynn's old arcade." Ram's voice broke slightly at the mention of the arcade, and he cleared his throat slightly before continuing. "Tron showed you a secret room under Flynn's arcade – a room containing a laser and an old computer." 

Sam's eyes widened. "What the fuck? Who told you all this?" 

"Well, Alan told me some of it," Roy said, taking his glasses off and cleaning the lenses with his shirt. "The rest wasn't hard to figure out. Alan knew that waiting forty years for Tron to evolve would be too much, technology and the MCP were moving forward too fast. He and I worked out that Tron would have to go back in time and fetch you – and here you are, twenty years younger than you should be." He perched his glasses back on his nose again, looking expectantly through them. 

Sam felt as if someone had hit him around the head with a length of two-by-four. "You – you already know we time-travelled?" he asked. The secondary implication – that they hadn't expected him to survive until this point in time – was one he decided to think about later. 

Roy snorted. "I was there when your father and Alan and Lora built the first laser. I may be old, but my memory is still good." 

"If you were there, why didn't they do that . . . that genetic lock thing with you as well?" Sam demanded. 

"I asked them not to." Roy looked slightly ashamed. "There was always the chance that the MCP would figure things out and come after everyone who was bonded to the laser. We figured it knew about Kevin and Alan and Lora – and you – but I was an unknown, and I still worked for ENCOM. They asked me to store copies of everything they had. I had files on the laser, the DNA encoder, Tron's base code, even your father's old hacking programs. We didn't dare let the MCP get its hands on that." 

"So you hid." The judgment was harsher than Sam had intended it to be, but he still felt a small thrill of victory as Roy winced. 

"I'm not a fighter, Sam. I never was. I'm just a programmer. I wrote actuarial software. What was I supposed to do when Dillinger came for them, talk them to death with tax codes?" 

Sam snorted. "Who knows, it might've worked. They were your _friends_. You could have done _something!_ "

Sam's accusation was louder than he'd intended it to be. Beside him, Tron sat up, and Sam had to think back over the last few seconds to pinpoint the moment when Tron had changed from peacefully asleep to awake and aware. Tron seemed to treat consciousness as if it was something that could be controlled with the flip of an internal switch. _Maybe to him, it is._

"Alan?" The word was part shock, part joy and part denial. 

Sam stared at Roy, seeing Tron do the same out of the corner of his eye. "Where did you hear that name?" Tron demanded. 

Roy wilted slightly, suddenly looking much older. "Oh. Tron, right? Sorry, you just look so much like him, I . . ." Roy stopped abruptly. "Alan was my friend, Tron." 

Sam picked up on the one telltale word. "Was?" he demanded. Roy had been vague about Alan and Lora's fate before, but he'd had enough. He wanted answers, now. 

"Dillinger had Alan killed, Sam. Just like he did your father." 

It was the second time Sam had been told that his father was dead at Dillinger's or the MCP's hands, but it still didn't mean all that much to him. His memories of his father were even vaguer than those of Alan or Roy, and he knew how ruthless Dillinger could be. "Really stacking up the body count, isn't he?" Sam said lightly. 

Roy's earlier disappointed look had been a faint echo of this one, and Sam felt an unfamiliar surge of guilt. He shoved it to the back of his mind. Guilt wouldn't get him anywhere.

"So. Anything else you want to know?" Sam asked, pulling bravado back around himself like a comfy jacket. "Though it looks like you know more than I do right now. Time travel, gene locks – hell, the first thing I knew was when Tron showed up and chased Junior's gang off. Then it got weird, with killer Frisbees and talking doors and shit like that. Then I turn up here, and hey, someone gave the laws of physics a holiday while I wasn't looking, 'cause there's weird flying things and motorbikes that shrink into sticks – don't think I didn't notice that – and some . . ." Sam's brain caught up with his mouth at that point and reminded him that he was dependent on these peoples' good will. He carefully edited 'crazy bitch' out of the sentence and went on with, "Some woman who thinks my tats mean I'm a 'program sympathizer'. What the fuck does that even mean?" 

"Ah." Roy resettled his glasses on his nose. "A program sympathizer is a human who's picked the MCP's side over the rebels. The MCP found that it was easiest to mark the humans who answered to him with black lines that mimic circuit lines. Anyone without the marks – or without circuit armor – gets killed on sight." 

Sam shook his head. "So why not mark everybody?" 

Roy smiled, as if Sam had said something smart. "Two reasons – well, three, actually. One, the fighters are all equipped with circuit armor – we learned to make it based on the suits worn by a couple of captured Black Guards – so they don't need it. Second, there's too many people in these caves to mark all of them. And third, if they turn up here, anyone _with_ the marks is killed on sight." 

Yeah, that matched what Sam had experienced. "Hey, it's not the first time I've been that close to death," he said, shrugging. 

"But if I have anything to say about it, it'll be the last time." 

Despite the unexpectedness of Tron's words, Sam didn't jump. Roy did, though. 

"Ah. Yes. Um, back to how you got here – you unlocked the laser, I guess? Well, of course, you'd have had to given that Tron's right here." 

Sam wrenched his thought processes sideways as he got back on track. "Yeah. I woke Tron up – weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life, man, these two identical people right in front of me. I sent the younger one back in time, and we decided to explore. That's when Sark caught us, and I guess you know the story from there." 

"Just that laser? You didn't unlock any others?" Roy's question was urgent. 

Sam scowled. "For the last time, no. Why are you asking me?" 

"You didn't get taken to Dillinger Systems before you came forward in time?" Roy leaned forward intently. 

Instinctively seeing the pose as an attempt to intimidate him, Sam surged to his feet. The action was somewhat hampered by the fact that he was still tangled up in his sleeping bag, but he shook off the clinging fabric and stalked up to the door. Grabbing the metal bars with both hands, Sam stared straight at Roy. Anon stepped into his line of sight, disc out and lit, but Sam ignored the silent man. "No, I didn't," he snarled. "Like I said, Tron cleaned up Junior's goons. They said they were going to take me there, but I never went. Got it?" Sam gave the metal door a shake, then turned and prowled to the back of the cell. 

Behind him, he could hear Roy's bemused voice. "That doesn't make sense. The secondary laser was locked down just like the first, but it hadn't been activated by anyone. So how . . ." 

"How is the MCP managing to produce so many living programs, if the laser isn't supposed to work?" Tron finished for him. 

"Alan wrote you pretty smart, didn't he?" Roy said, sounding approving. 

Sam turned around, rejoining the conversation. "Maybe it just found a way to bypass the lock, you ever think of that?" he asked gruffly. "Any lock can be broken." 

Roy's voice took on an edge Sam had never heard before. "That doesn't explain why the MCP began its conquest in the very same year that you came from." 

Sam walked slowly back to Tron and sat down on the tangled sleeping bag that he'd kicked aside. "2010? You sure?" 

"Very sure," Roy affirmed grimly. "I was there."


	9. Chapter 9

"LORA." 

Lora's eyes slammed open, the memory shattering at the sound of her captor's voice. Years ago, she'd have told the MCP that she was human and needed her sleep, or even made some kind of dry comment about computers never resting. Now, though, she was tired, physically and emotionally, and she said nothing.

"SAM FLYNN WAS TALLER THAN I EXPECTED." 

"Sam?" she echoed, still half caught in the memory of the time when Sam had been a six-year-old boy. 

"HE IS IN THE FUTURE." 

The screen on Lora's wall lit up, showing a picture of two men standing in the half-familiar future of the MCP's rule. She could tell from the clarity and height that it had been taken from a Recognizer, but that was a secondary concern next to the faces she saw. One looked so much like Alan that she had to look away, the screen blurring for a moment as tears welled unbidden in her eyes. Swallowing, she focused on the man standing next to him. 

Tattoos peeked from under his collar, and it took Lora a moment to separate out the more fluid lines from the geometric patterns of those who'd submitted themselves to the MCP's rule. Her heart ached as she saw the hardness in his eyes, but they were still _Sam's_ eyes. There was still an echo of the little boy she'd held in her arms. 

"Sam," she whispered. "He made it." 

"HE PROVED RECALCITRANT," the MCP said emotionlessly. 

Lora shut her eyes. "You killed him, didn't you?" she said, familiar despair washing over her. "Or will kill him." It was over. Sam had found the laser, found Tron, but it hadn't worked. Sam was dead. The last hope she'd had, gone. And yet . . . the MCP's last hope, too. 

"THE LASER IN THE ARCADE BASEMENT WAS DESTROYED IN THAT TIME AFTER HE WENT THROUGH," the MCP confirmed. 

Fresh horror surged through numbed emotions. "You knew," she said flatly. "You knew all along." She opened her eyes again, searching Alan's – Tron's – beloved features. Taking in the so-familiar uniform. "That's why the Rinzlers you've shown me look like Tron. You copied Alan's program from the Arcade computer." 

"COPIED. MODIFIED. IMPROVED. IT DOESN'T MATTER." She could hear the shrug in the MCP's electronic voice. "THEY ARE NO LONGER AN OBSTACLE." 

Laughter, half-hysterical, bubbled up from Lora's chest. She was exhausted, and she no longer had anything to lose. "Then you've failed. You destroyed the one laser that could take you into the future, and you lost your last chance to activate the one you stole from me. You lost the game, Master Control Program."

"SO SAM FLYNN IS THE KEY."

The red light in the corner of the room that told her that the two-way was on abruptly blinked out. And, despite her conviction that it didn't matter anymore, she felt a chill.

* * *

Sam thumped face-first against the sleeping bag again, growling and kicking backward in an attempt to make his captor let go. While he didn't connect, he could feel the movement as his opponent slid aside, and he used that one moment to roll over and twist his wrists out of the firm grip they'd been held in. 

"Good," Tron said, holding out a hand to help him up. Sam eyed the hand suspiciously and pushed himself up under his own power, making Tron laugh. "Very good. You're much quicker at getting free than you were before." 

"You're cheating," Sam grumbled, rubbing bruised elbows. "You're using some kind of program trick to win." 

Tron's face went serious, and Sam flinched. Cops looked like that. "Sam, if we have to go up against the other programs here in this world, then they will also be faster, stronger, tougher than you are. I don't want to lose you to the first program who decides you'd make a good hostage." 

Sam seethed. "I can take care of myself!" 

"Oh, clearly," Tron said. "Because you can win against me every time in hand-to hand combat. Sam, any programs here would have been coded _after_ I was. They'll be worse than I am. I can defend against that trick Sark pulled on me now, but I'm not going to assume that it's the only one they have." 

Sam was silent, his mind offering helpful pictures of Tron slumped unmoving on the deck of the Recognizer. The programs here _could_ take down Tron. And while he knew how to use a gun . . . he'd seen bullets bounce off Tron's armor in that first, unbelievable encounter down at the docks. 

"Sam . . . when you can win against me, I'll trust you to look after yourself. Deal?" 

Reluctantly, Sam nodded. It went against everything he'd been taught by Da – by _Darley_. _'Never show weakness. Make them know you're stronger than they are.'_ But Tron . . . Tron was an ally. Even a friend. "Deal." 

For a moment, they simply stood there looking at each other. Then the silent guard knocked on the bars, and both program and human looked around. 

The door opened to reveal a woman with cropped dark hair and silvery eyes, wearing a summer dress that had once been white and now was a pale brownish-gray. "Greetings," she said measuringly, her voice sweet but cool. "Sam Flynn, welcome to the Resistance. And Tron, also." 

Tron answered for both of them, which was probably a good thing as Sam was still fumbling for words. Her almost archaic phrasing and serene untouchability made her seem almost inhuman, despite the dull smudges of grime along arms and hands that had clearly seen hard work. "Greetings," Tron said politely. "I take it the DNA test proved valid?" 

"Indeed." The woman nodded to Anon, and the guard walked to the other side of the room to retrieve the keys. "My name is Radia. Quorra sent me to give you a tour of the caverns." 

When Anon unlocked the door, Sam moved for it, but he was cut off by Tron smoothly stepping in front of him. _My own personal bodyguard._ The thought held less resentment than it had before, somehow.

"A tour?" Sam asked, following Tron out. "How big _is_ this place?" 

"Not large enough for all those who require sanctuary," Radia said, a flash of sorrow crossing her eyes. "Come. I will show you how we live." 

* * *

Sleeping bags on pallets lined the tunnels and caverns, rolled up out of the way for what had to be daytime down here. People crowded everywhere; curled up against the walls, eating the meager rations provided by the kitchen-cavern, washing in the limited trickle of water downstream from the tiny underground river that was their water supply. In one cavern, a woman was reading a book to a cluster of bright-eyed children wearing much-mended clothes; in another, a man in program armor with bright green circuits dispensed what medical attention he could to the queue outside his cave. As they passed, people greeted Radia, and she frequently stopped to talk to them. 

At first, Sam was impatient at the pauses, but Tron's intent focus on those conversations made him reevaluate. This wasn't a tour just for them. This had to be Radia's daily rounds, a way for her to listen to the worries of the people who survived down here. However, she had apparently noticed his displeasure at waiting, as she turned to face him when she had finished her most recent discussion. "Not all of our people are here, Sam. Those few who dare to go out during the gaps between the passing of the MCP's observation satellites are outside, along with most of our warriors. It is easier to keep the two sides separate."

Well, that explained why he hadn't seen anyone else in armor yet. 

They moved on again. Flickering electric lights, fed by a pair of unreliable old generators, illuminated caverns that were mostly bare rock. Here and there, posters had been glued to the walls, faded and fractured in the wake of decades. A Space Paranoids advert, its colors dim and its lettering scribbled over by marker pen, caught his eye and he stopped, gasping. This world was so strange that it was easy to forget that it was the same one he'd left twenty years ago, but here – _here_ was solid proof delivered by fragile paper. 

"Sam?" Tron asked, turning to look back. 

"I. Uh. It's real. This _is_ happening." 

Tron nodded. "Yes." 

Suspicious eyes flickered towards them, the nearest adults wary of the two, looking – as always – at Sam's tattoos. For the first time in his life, Sam wished that there was a way to cover them up, and he pulled his arms further into his jacket sleeves and hunched his head down. 

Suddenly, a tiny blonde cannonball slammed into Sam's knees and hung on with all the force of a determined sloth. "I don't know where my daddy is!" it sobbed. "You're Radia's people, right? Please help me find my daddy." 

Sam looked down, startled. He reached for the girl, intending to push her away and tell her to look elsewhere, when Tron knelt down next to her. "What does your daddy look like, kiddo?" he asked gently. 

The girl transferred her grip from Sam's knees to Tron's neck, and Sam backed off a few steps as soon as she let go. "Tall, like him," she said to Tron. "Blond hair. Armor with lights on, like yours." 

"Okay." Tron put his arms around the girl, lifting her as he straightened and settling her on his hip. "Let's find your dad. Where did you last see him?" 

The girl sniffled and nodded, looking around from her new height advantage. "We were in the food cave, getting lunch. Then someone came up to my daddy and asked him to go with them, and he told me to stay where I was and wait. But the benches were getting really crowded, and Daddy had been gone a long time, so I went to look for him, but I can't find him!" 

"We'll find him, I promise," Tron said reassuringly. "Come on, let's try there first. He's probably worrying about you." 

Trailed by Sam and Radia, Tron headed in the direction of the kitchen cavern they'd been shown earlier with unerring accuracy. Tron's guess had been good: slightly before they got there, they saw a blond man with blue circuits heading straight for them. "Daddy!" the girl squealed.

Tron set her down, and she ran forward to the blond man. "Bethany!" he called, relief in his voice as he caught hold of her and swung her up into his arms. Over her head, he glared at them, turning away. 

"He could've said thank you," Sam muttered to Tron.

Further away, the conversation between father and daughter was still entirely audible. "Did they hurt you, Bethy?" 

"No, Daddy," the girl said, sounding slightly indignant. "They're nice people." 

As the man turned away, Sam could see a faint, pale, reddish line on the back of the man's neck above the rim of the disc that he wore. It was too neat to be a scratch, too surgically precise. Thinking back, he'd seen similar marks on the lightcycle riders when they didn't have their helmets up. 

His eyes narrowed. Something was going on here.

* * * 

Sam met Quorra's still-suspicious gaze with one of his own. Another seat had been squeezed into the meeting room for him; Tron had been offered one as well, but he'd gruffly refused, saying that he preferred to stand. Standing against the wall, behind Sam's right shoulder, he was attracting more sidelong looks from Quorra's rebel leaders than Sam himself was. 

"I still don't get why you can't just send somebody to infiltrate their base and plant a few bombs," Sam complained. "No more MCP, no more problem." 

"We tried that in the beginning." The ridiculously tall man that Quorra had introduced as Jalen looked up from the table, eyes sad and hinting at too many losses. "None of them came back. Eventually, I volunteered to use the prototype disc chip that Ram's mother developed . . ." 

"Whoa, wait. Disc chip?" Sam demanded. 

The green-circuited doctor – Gibson – that Sam had seen in passing during Radia's tour spoke up. "The disc chip is what links us to the discs we carry. When implanted, it carries signals from the brain to the disc, and vice versa. It's what lets us use our weapons." 

"So that's what those scars in the back of your necks are," Sam said, turning the concept over in his head. "But why discs? Can't you just shoot 'em?" 

It was Shaddox who answered this time. "Programs are bulletproof, unless you shoot them in the eye," he said flatly. "The only weapon that works is that of our enemy. We collect every disc that we can from the programs that we kill, wipe them, and link them to the chips. Then we implant the chips into the most promising of the fighters." 

Sam grimaced, and Jalen took that as a chance to continue his explanation. "The armor we'd stripped off the Sark we'd killed didn't fit me, and we weren't able to produce it, then. So Gibson's predecessor tattooed me as a program sympathizer and they left me in one of the farms. It worked, for a while." He rolled up one of his sleeves, exposing black bars that stood out vividly against his skin. "It took a few weeks, but I managed to get into Dillinger's tower. They detected the explosives at once." He took a hard breath. "They captured me, interrogated me. I don't remember much of that time. Quorra retrieved my disc from where I'd hidden it and broke me out personally. They weren't expecting a human to be able to use one – I took quite a few of them by surprise." 

Sam nodded slowly. That explained a lot about how they'd treated him earlier. His respect for the tall strategist rose several notches. 

"So we gave up on that idea," Quorra said, all eyes in the room snapping back to her as she spoke. "It won't work. They can detect explosives fifty meters away, and anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time is summarily killed – sympathizer or not – so we can't send in someone to hack the computers. All we can do is survive, and try to fight back." 

"There is another reason you may not wish to destroy the tower," Radia said fixing Sam with a gaze that made him want to squirm at how exposed it made him feel. "Dillinger possesses another laser. He uses it to create programs, many copies of them. If it is the same as the laser that brought you here, then you may be able to use it to return home." 

"It's possible." 

Tron's words, unexpected after Radia's bombshell, made the whole table jump. 

"You have something to say, _Tron?_ " Quorra asked. 

"I do." Tron reached behind his back and undocked his disc, which made half of the assembled warriors reach for their own discs. Ram, however, held up a hand and gestured for them to stand down, watching intently. "When Alan Bradley wrote me, he included the data necessary to shut down the MCP. It was a separate update, designed to compile at the last minute so that it wouldn't interfere with my databases." He separated the two rings, the edges humming with light. "If I can get one of these into the MCP's central core, it'll destabilize and destroy it from the inside out." 

"One problem, program," Quorra said dryly. "We're not inside a computer. At best, all you'll achieve is some broken circuit boards." 

Tron smiled slightly. "That won't be a problem. It's tagged to lead with the MCP's own auto-uploader. It won't be able to stop itself from installing the data on my disc." He twisted both discs together and redocked them, and the whole room seemed to relax slightly. 

"Seems like Grandpa was right about Alan always trying to think of everything," Ram said quietly. 

"Not quite everything," Jalen said, meeting the eyes of everyone around the table. "If you're both going to get in there, you'll need a distraction. Something to get the attention of the programs so that the alarms you'll set off will be buried in the rest of the klaxons." 

"So. It's now." Quorra drummed her fingers on the table, face intent and looking oddly relieved at the idea. "You may be good, Tron, but I'm not going to bet everything on you. I've lost too much to do that again. My team and I need to talk about how we're going to minimize the risks of this fool's errand." Unexpectedly, she smiled. "I always did prefer a more aggressive strategy. That can wait, though. Shaddox, if Sam's going to be in on this, he'll need a disc. Can you train him to use one?" 

Shaddox's reply was lost as Sam realized just what Quorra was saying. "Whoa, wait, what? Oh, hell no. I'm not having you crazy cyber-ninjas messing around with my brain." 

"You won't feel it." Gibson's slightly contemptuous expression was not helping Sam's peace of mind. "It's done under general anesthetic, and none of my patients have ended up with brain damage." 

"Always a first time, right?" Sam said a little wildly, feeling as if he needed to hit something. "Come on, tell me you don't mean this. I'll be fine. My ink fooled you lot, maybe it'll fool the MCP too." 

"Sam." It was Tron again, and his deep, gravelly voice soothed the panic that was triggering Sam's fight or flight instincts. "I'd rather you could defend yourself. And I can teach you, if you'd rather that Shaddox didn't instruct you." 

Somehow, the implication that Tron thought it was nothing to worry about made Sam relax. Across the room, Shaddox nodded too. "I'll want to assess Tron's training as we go," he said. "He may not know everything we've learned." 

That smile flickered onto Tron's face again. "Agreed." 

"Don't I get a say in this?" Sam said grumpily. 

Quorra's dark eyes pinned him. "Of course. What _do_ you say, Sam Flynn?" 

Sam huffed an exasperated sigh. "Fine. Sure. You can implant one of those chip things."

"Thank you, Sam," Ram told him. "Gibson will . . . ah. You've been staying in one of the lockups." 

"In _jail,_ " Sam said pointedly. 

Ram nodded. "The problem is, we don't dare house you among the refugees, and putting you in the disc warrior barracks could cause . . . conflict. Would you mind staying in the cell? We can give you the key, and Anon won't be watching you anymore. It's not much, but it's private." He glanced at Quorra. A few days ago, Sam wouldn't have noticed the tiny smiles on both their faces. 

"Yeah, whatever." Sam stood up. "I might look like a dumb thug, but I know when I'm not wanted. Come on, Tron. Back to our nice cozy prison." 

"As I was going to say earlier, Gibson will take you to the surgery cave after the meeting ends so that you can have your new disc installed." 

Sam flicked him a mocking salute and left the cave, Tron beside him as always. 

* * *

They'd made plans, or at least outlines, but they still needed more data. Up-to-date information, which Jalen's contacts among the farmers were still uniquely placed to provide. Not all of the people ostensibly supporting the MCP truly believed in his regime; many, in fact, simply wanted to be left alone, and that was the easiest way. Some had no problems with providing a little extra information to the Resistance on the side. 

The wind sliced past, the solitary beauty of the desert landscape in the cool pre-dawn light a soothing sight. In theory, he should have never wanted to go back to the farmlands and the city again after what he'd been through, but somehow he felt called back there. He guessed it was because every trip he made successfully was his way of sticking a finger up at the MCP and all its programs. Quorra understood that, luckily, giving him the scouting missions nine times out of ten. 

He'd timed his lightcycle ride between the passes of the satellites, trusting the hyper-efficient engine to get him there in time. And it did; minutes before the next one was due over the horizon, he was collapsing the bike into its baton and stepping inside the wooden shack where his contact lived. 

"Annie?" he called quietly as he stepped into the dim interior. "Are you here?" 

The hiss of a dermal diffusion injector caught him completely by surprise. 

* * *

He blinked awake inside the Dillinger Systems tower, lying on his back in one of the medical rooms. His head was held in place by a helmet that seemed to be made of metal straps, and there was a buzzing sensation against the back of his neck. He could feel his disc somewhere behind him, out of reach of hands and feet that were as bound as his head. 

"WELCOME BACK, ABRAXAS," said a familiar voice. 

And memory returned. 

He glanced down at himself to see his circuits burning acid-yellow, and he knew, hopelessly, that the MCP would copy every memory he had that it found useful. It had done it the first time he'd come here, and nearly every time after that. He'd be left with accurate information on what he was trying to find out . . . and no recollection whatsoever of being drained like this. It _hurt_ , hurt nearly as badly as the knowledge that he was betraying his friends and could do nothing about it. 

They hadn't known, then, that the prototype chip was vulnerable to hacking. Hadn't known that the MCP could reprogram _people_ if he got far enough inside. 

"FINALLY," the MCP said. "ONCE THE RESISTANCE HAS BEEN CRUSHED, I WILL NO LONGER REQUIRE YOU. YOUR CHIP, HOWEVER, WILL BE USEFUL." 

"Why mine?" Abraxas gritted out. "Why not one of the newer ones?" 

"THOSE ARE USELESS," it said dismissively. "I CAN'T CONNECT TO THEM. YOURS, HOWEVER – I HAVE PLANS FOR YOURS." 

Another static shock crackled under his skin as the MCP continued to ruthlessly extract Abraxas' memories from his disc, unseen data spiraling upwards and absorbed by the resource-hungry program. 

The unwilling traitor clenched his fists and screamed.


	10. Chapter 10

As promised, Anon was gone by the time they returned, the key sitting very obviously on the chair that Roy had used. 

"So what's really bothering you about the disc installation?" Tron asked, leaning against the wall and watching Sam patiently. "The surgery? The loss of control?" 

"Leave it, okay? I already agreed to it," Sam said grumpily, snatching up the key. The garden chair was formed plastic, the wraparound curves making it impractical to sit on it backwards, so he jammed it against the wall and leaned on the backrest of the chair instead. 

"Yes, I was there," Tron said dryly. "I'd still like to know." 

"I said, leave it," Sam snarled, moving forward and glaring into Tron's eyes, using every bit of his matching height and bulk as he invaded Tron's personal space. 

Tron didn't move, didn't react other than to track Sam's movement and meet his gaze. "Sam, if I know what the problem is, I may be able to help," he said calmly. If I don't know the parameters, then I can't protect you properly." 

Sam backed off a step, shaking his head. "Yeah, 'cause that's all you want to do. Protect me." 

"It's what I was programmed to do," Tron said softly. 

Turning away, Sam stalked over to the opposite wall and leaned against it, his arm cushioning his forehead. "I must be fucking crazy," he said roughly. 

It was Tron's turn to walk forward then, and he rested one hand on Sam's shoulder. Sam jerked at the unexpected contact, but let Tron keep his hand there. "You're not crazy, Sam," Tron said, the bone-deep certainty in his voice resonating with something inside him. "You're in a situation you never could have imagined, and you're dealing the best way you know how to." 

Sam laughed, a short, sharp sound that was almost a sob. "If I'm not crazy, then why did I agree to have a lump of dead metal linked to my brain? To my _thoughts?_ " 

"Ah." Tron's voice was understanding, and Sam shivered. "So that's it." 

"Yeah, that's it. I'm scared, okay?" He ripped himself away from the wall and Tron's touch, going to grab the bars of their cell and stare into it. "I've run weapons for Darley. They break. People throw them away. They're _tools_." 

Sam heard a hum behind him, and turned to see Tron removing his own disc. "Discs aren't dead things," Tron said, holding it out to him. "I don't know how it is for humans, but my disc isn't just a tool. It's . . . me. It even carries a backup copy of everything that I am – my code, my memories, my experiences. Everything that I do, see, feel is on here." 

"If it's that valuable, then why would you throw it at people?" Sam asked, taking a cautious step forward. 

Tron held out the disc as if he intended to stay there all day, that little smile creeping back onto his face. "I never asked. The important thing is that it works – and it's very much alive." 

Making his mind up, Sam reached out for Tron's disc, the program letting go willingly. It was unexpectedly warm – skin-heat warm – and lighter than he'd expected, and he gasped, instinctively gripping it tighter after a moment of worrying he was going to drop it. His fingertips dragged across the inner ring as he did so, and Tron hissed. 

"You can feel that?" Sam asked, hastily moving his grip so that he was only holding the smooth black edges. 

"Yes," Tron said, his usual equanimity disturbed by what looked like a grimace of pain. "I could feel it. As I said, that's me." 

Sam looked down at the disc, thinking. "Does it hurt every time that ring comes into contact with skin?" he asked. 

Tron looked surprised, as if he'd expected a different question. "No. The . . . sensitivity damps down in combat. And I haven't seen anyone here touching someone else's disc." 

After another few minutes, Sam nodded decisively and handed Tron's disc back to him. The program re-docked it with a faint air of relief, then looked inquiringly at Sam. Sam grinned back, burying his trepidation. Tron had a disc, and he was fine. "Okay. Let's do this." 

* * *

"Jalen?" 

Jalen blinked awake, seeing a petite brunette looking down at him with concern. The light coming from the single window brushed streaks of gold into her short hair, and the black tattoos she wore only seemed to accentuate her slim arms and throat. "Annie?" 

Her face brightened into relief. "Thank goodness! I was worried you'd never wake up. You must have been really tired when you got here – you fell asleep again. You should rest more."

"No time, Annie," he told her with a smile as he sat up. His neck ached, and he reminded himself (again) that sleeping sprawled out like a stick insect was a bad idea. "I need the usual." 

"Just in time, then," she said, handing him a pile of printouts."The satellite orbits change in three days – they're tightening up the gaps. And they've upgraded the security measures on the East Gate." 

Jalen glanced through the printouts. "What time is it?" 

"Fifteen-oh-seven," she said promptly. "The satellite gap opened up three minutes ago." 

Jalen laid a hand on her arm, palm and fingers covering her forearm from wrist to elbow. "Then I'd better leave. Thank you, Annie." 

The white-glowing lines on his arm created an odd contrast with the sunlight pouring in from the window. For a moment, his circuits looked almost yellow. 

* * *

"I don't like being tied down," Sam snapped. 

Gibson gave him an exasperated look. "Look, the straps are so you don't fall off the frame during the procedure," he said with rapidly vanishing patience. "I don't know about you, but if I was in your place – and I was, once – I'd prefer it to be quick and easy. 'Course, if you don't, there's plenty of other people I could be sticking this in. It's a Rinzler disc, too – they'd be queuing up for it." 

Sam glared at him, then took another look at the padded metal frame. It was clearly intended that the subject should be lying face down on it, and the broad brown leather straps and heavy-duty buckles lent it an even more ominous air. Above it hung a bulky spotlight of the kind that were (once) used in playhouse theatres, not operating theatres. The glittering steel of the implements on the tray on the stand next to the frame were laid alongside a tiny plastic capsule that contained the all-important chip that was to be linked into his nervous system. The little clear bubble looked incongruously innocent next to the rest of it. 

"I'll be here, Sam," Tron said unexpectedly. "I'll watch for you." 

"And be here when I wake up, right?" Sam asked, trying for cocky and only managing partial success. 

"I'll be here when you wake, Sam," Tron promised. 

Sam nodded once, sharply, then turned to Gibson. "Okay, doc. Let's do this." He nodded his head in Tron's direction. "But if I have to be strapped to that thing, he's doing it. Not you." 

Gibson's eyes flicked between them, and he shrugged. "Whatever. As long as you don't fall off while I'm operating on you, I'm happy." He turned away, fiddling with something on the bench that held the tray of medical implements. 

Gritting his teeth, Sam lay face down on the bench. He couldn't help but flinch as Tron laid the first strap over his back, and Tron laid one hand on his shoulder in a brief press before cinching the buckle so that it held him firmly. Even that momentary touch made Sam relax, and he barely twitched as the program-turned-flesh fastened him down. The pressure was firm, but not painfully so. The last thing to go into place were the padded blocks that would prevent him from moving his head. 

"Okay?" Tron asked when the last buckle had been fastened. 

Sam tried to shift, but was pulled up short. "Okay," he agreed, voice muffled by the oval-shaped opening that his face was resting on. It gave him a fascinating view of the floor. He noticed, irrelevantly, that the rock floor in here was impeccably clean. 

There was a sudden hiss and a sting in his arm, and his hand clenched into a fist – about the only thing he could move, with the possible exception of his toes. "Hey, watch it!" 

"I _am_ watching," Gibson said, too cheerfully for Sam's taste. "Okay, now count down from ten for me. In binary." 

"Binary? What the fuck do . . . you think . . . I . . . am . . ."

The world went away. 

* * * 

Sam blinked open blurry eyes, the gray haze above him slowly resolving into a ceiling. What was he doing here? He'd been talking to Gibson about the disc surgery . . .

"Have you even started yet?" he mumbled. 

"I'm _done_ ," came the mildly irritated reply from across the room. "Just lie there until you feel ready to sit up." 

Sam immediately tried to sit up, but only managed it partway before slumping back down again. Somehow, in the course of being unconscious, he'd been moved to something that felt like a hospital bed. "What the fuck did you shoot me with?" he grumbled, head lolling sideways to meet Tron's worried blue eyes. "Hey there." 

"Hey, Sam," Tron echoed, relaxing a little.

"Standard general anesthetic," Gibson said wearily. "Tron, make sure he drinks that water when he gets himself into a sitting position. 

"I don't feel any different," Sam complained, lying there in grudging obedience. "Thought you were going to give me a disc." 

"The synchronization process doesn't work unless you're awake," Gibson told him with the air of one who had repeated it a thousand times. "The chip's installed and active, it linked in just fine. No problems." 

Sam pushed himself upright, and Tron silently pressed a glass of water to his lips. Sam swallowed, only then realizing how thirsty he was as cool, clean water eased his dry mouth and slid down his throat. 

Lifting one hand, Sam touched the back of his neck. A patch of his hair at the base of his skull had been shaved, leaving a neat, short stripe, and over that freshly shaved area was a pad held on with surgical tape. He couldn't feel the chip under the smooth pad, which made him wonder just how deep the tiny chip had been buried. 

"Stop poking at it," Gibson called from across the room. "Finish your water, eat the sandwich, and then we can suit you up and link you to your disc." 

"I'm glad you're okay, Sam," Tron said quietly as Sam took the sandwich from him. 

"Yeah, well, me too." 

The sandwich vanished quickly, and then Sam followed Gibson's gesture to go stand on a hexagonal white plate in one corner of the room. Then he stepped off it just as quickly. "What the fuck, you want me to _what_?"

"Strip," Gibson repeated patiently. "Can't suit you up in your street clothes. You can leave your underwear on."

"Fuck that, I'm not giving up this jacket." 

There was a moment's silence.

"Sam. Perhaps you can wear it over your armor, unless you are in training," Tron suggested. 

Sam didn't like it, but it made sense. And it'd prove that he hadn't entirely lost everything he was. 

_Even if you didn't_ like _what you were?_ whispered a quiet voice in his mind. It sounded like his own. Anyway, it couldn't be worse than stripping off to get his tattoos done.

"All right, then," he said, putting a little bit of growl into the words, and shucked his clothes in a silent dare for either man to say anything. Neither did; Gibson was doing something with a cobbled-together control panel, and Tron was simply watching. As always. 

Feeling exposed in more ways than one, Sam stepped back onto the plate. Gibson made one last adjustment, turned, and nodded. "Okay," Gibson said. "This shouldn't hurt, so tell me if it does." 

It didn't hurt. It felt like cool liquid creeping up his legs, a rubbery black substance with all the softness and smoothness of good leather that set as close as a second skin around him. Fortunately for his comfort, it wasn't entirely skin-tight over certain important areas. Sliding up his back and chest, down his arms, it finished moving neatly down to his wrist and formed a kind of half-glove over his thumbs and index fingers. 

"We worked this out from the programs we captured," Gibson said absently, watching the digital gauges in his control board. "When we can, we disassemble their armor and liquidize their bodysuits." 

"How the hell do I take a piss in this thing?" Sam asked in return, practicalities being rather more important to him than the origins of the material he was wearing. 

"You control it via your disc. Don't worry, it'll be instinctive. Okay, I think these will fit you." 

Sam blinked at the sudden change of topic, and looked over at Gibson. The man was holding up various bits of armor that looked like the ones he'd seen on the disc warriors – and, before that, on Tron. Reminded, he looked over at Tron, and smiled at the program's nod of pleased approval. 

"Tron, can you give me a hand here? I usually have assistants for this, but I had to send my nurse out to Quorra after we'd finished with the surgery so that he could help with organizing things. Anon sometimes helps, but he's out training with the rest." 

"Yes. I can help." Tron moved forward, taking the back plate from Gibson and turning to Sam. 

"Whatever, just get it done," Sam muttered under his breath. He hadn't expected the armor to _move_ once it was on him, but it somehow sealed itself to the bodysuit and extruded itself further. The arm and leg guards melded themselves seamlessly into the whole, and Sam looked down at himself in surprise. This was . . . actually kind of cool. And it was entirely covering his tattoos, which normally he'd have a problem with. Here, though, it seemed right.

Then Gibson turned around and removed a disc from a slot in – no, not the wall, a machine in a darkened corner that he hadn't noticed before. He passed it to Tron as if he knew of Sam's unease with the disc – and what _had_ Tron told Gibson, while Sam was unconscious? 

He'd trusted this guy to poke around with his brain. He could cope with the syncing process. Right?

While Sam had been worrying over what Gibson might know, Tron had moved up behind him. There was a slight shove, a click, and a sudden feeling of extra weight on his back. "That's it?" Sam said, unexpectedly disappointed. "Shouldn't I be glowing, like you guys?" 

"No, that's just the beginning," Gibson said from over by the wall. There were too many lights and panels, Sam decided. "We still need to get you properly synced. Go sit down in that chair over there, and we'll finish the process." 

The chair Gibson had pointed at was an old armchair from which the seat cushion had been removed. There was an incongruous concave metal plate somehow affixed to the back of the chair where his disc was clearly intended to fit, studded with squares of white light and showing cut-outs behind which multicolored wires ran. Another, smaller, plate of blank metal was at about neck-height, and there were yet more multi-colored wires extruding from the plate that went back into the chair. Warily, Sam sat down. 

"Lean back . . . yeah, that's good. Okay, just stay there," Gibson said from behind the chair. There was a pause, and then the surgeon added, "Tron's watching me." 

The upper plate would have been cold against Sam's neck were it not for the pad that he'd almost forgotten was there. His disc rested snugly inside the circular one below, and he could somehow feel the metal pressing slightly against the protruding whatever-it-was that held his disc on. He was about to ask what was taking so long, when . . .

Light. 

Sam's vision whited out as the disc activated, his brain feeling as though it was too large for his skull to contain in one dizzy moment. Suddenly, his disc was _there_ , as much a part of him as his right hand, the automatic knowledge it contained part of him as well. He gasped, shuddering, eyes wide – Tron had been _right_ , the disc was warm and alive and indisputably part of him. 

The white glare faded slowly, like a drug trip, and he blinked to find that not all of the light had been a product of an overloaded mind. The circuits on his armor that had been dull before were now shining a bright white, and Gibson was watching him with a raised eyebrow. 

"Whoa," Sam managed, looking up at Tron. "You weren't kidding." 

Tron's worried face relaxed into a smile. "I'd hoped it would be that way for you," he said, stepping backwards. "Congratulations, Sam." 

"No kidding," Gibson said, eyebrow still slightly raised. "Well, everything checked out during the syncing process, so you're free to go. Leave the pad on for twenty-four hours, get a good night's sleep, and you'll be ready to start training with your disc tomorrow morning. If you feel the chip or the disc going suddenly hot or cold, or starting to hurt, get your ass back here. Someone will be here and they'll be able to wake me up. If it tingles, like pins and needles? That's normal, it'll go away after an hour or so." 

Sam leaned forward, still marveling at the feeling of the disc being part of him. Why had he ever worried about this? "Feels like I could start using it now." 

"Give it a night, anyway. You're too late for practice as it is – the satellites will be over now, and the inside cavern will have the early birds curled up in it. If you go now, you should make it to dinner. 

Sam nodded shortly. "Yeah. Uh – thanks." 

Gibson nodded acknowledgement. "Go on, get out. Dinner." 

Sam turned to grab his jacket, then followed Tron out of the door. The armor was astonishingly comfortable – he felt as if he could sleep in it, which he'd probably have to do anyway. And warm, much warmer than he'd expected. He didn't need the jacket, not wearing this. 

He hung on to it anyway.


	11. Chapter 11

"Time to wake up, disc warriors," boomed a deep male voice. 

Sam made a half-awake complaining noise, then sat up in protest as the warm bulk against his back was suddenly gone. "Already?" he grumbled. Beside him, Tron was already sliding out of the other sleeping bag, and how had he ended up back to back with Tron anyway? If he'd thought about it, he'd have assumed that it would have been uncomfortable to be almost disc-to-disc, but that had apparently not been the case. 

Shrugging off the question and the sleeping bag both, he leveled an unimpressed look at Shaddox. "I'm not a disc warrior," he said pointedly. 

"Not yet, perhaps," Shaddox said calmly. "Come. The satellites are nearly below the horizon, and it's time for breakfast." 

* * *

"So what's all this stuff about satellites you keep going on about?" Sam asked as he followed Shaddox through tunnels that Radia had never taken them through. Breakfast had been unidentifiable and conducted in silence, but it had tasted reasonable and satisfied his growling stomach. 

"Ah." Shaddox almost seemed surprised. "Forgive me. I forgot that you didn't grow up here." He paused as the passageway apparently dead-ended, and began to climb the broken rock wall. "The MCP keeps watch on the planet using the satellites in low-earth orbit. They have a set orbit, so by knowing when they're overhead, we can avoid being seen by them. Jalen returned yesterday with the news that they are about to change the orbital periodicity of the satellites, which means less time outside for us." 

"Oh." That made sense. Then Sam realized that the light above them was not Shaddox's lantern, but the gold of daylight. The air was warming as he climbed, the heat a shock after days spent in the cool and slightly damp caves. His bodysuit seemed to fend the worst of it off, but there was no such protection for his head. 

Sam squinted in the low early-morning sun, eyes taking in the deep bowl of a natural rock amphitheatre as they adjusted to the brightness. He'd begun to think that there _was_ no sun in this hellhole of a future, but the light above him gave the lie to that conclusion. 

Around him were dozens of men and women, all with discs. Some were training on rock, moving through synchronized patterns that Sam recognized as combat moves. Others were on shallow layers of sand, and some – the ones practicing hand-to-hand – were on deep drifts, their feet sinking into the grainy layers as they attempted to pin each other. 

"You'll be using one of the fault lines around the edge," Shaddox said, pointing to one of three deep cracks through the edge of the bowl. "It's safer that way – your disc won't hit anything but rock. I'll send somebody to fetch you when it's time to go into the indoor cavern." With that, he turned and walked away, apparently heading for the area where Anon was taking a group through some of the more complicated patterns

The younger man bristled silently – or at least the old part of him that was still Billy did. Sam, however, understood how limited Shaddox's time was, and he shrugged. "Okay. C'mon, Tron, we haven't got all day." 

The fault, when they reached it, was cooler and shadier than the open amphitheater, which was good news for Sam's incipient sunburn. At the far end, it had been blocked off with sand and boulders in what looked like a suspiciously convenient landslide, and Sam could see the old cracks on what had once been the higher ridge as he glanced up. Good use of dynamite. 

Something thumped into his shoulder, half-spinning him and knocking him down to one knee. "Never drop your guard," Tron admonished from behind him. 

Sam got to his feet, finally facing Tron. The program held a fist-sized stone in his right hand, which prompted a confused look from Sam. "Rocks? Really?" 

"Rocks," Tron confirmed. "I'm not throwing my discs at you until later. For now, I'm going to show you how to hold, aim and throw, and then you can try intercepting this with your disc." 

"Going to blindfold me as well?" Sam asked, half-jokingly. "Make it even more like _Star Wars_?"

Tron's frown of puzzlement had Sam waving the comment off. "Never mind, I'll explain later. You going to show me how to throw this thing or not?" 

"Of course." Tron tossed the rock aside and drew his own disc, and Sam did the same. It came away in his hand with a click that he felt more than heard, oddly solid in his hand for all its lightness. Something, some kind of disc-granted instinct, had him flipping a mental switch and watching as the edge lit up in blazing white. 

"Good," Tron said provisionally. "You managed not to cut your fingers off." 

"These things can _do_ that?" Sam asked in horror. 

"Oh, yes. It's rare, but it can happen. After all, these discs are _designed_ to cut through armor." Tron looked slightly too amused at that piece of information. 

"Right," Sam muttered, looking down at his disc. "Got it." 

Apparently, Tron thought he'd given Sam enough bad news for one day. "Always hold your disc from the inside ring," he instructed, showing Sam how he gripped the weapon. 

Sam carefully shifted his grasp to mimic Tron's, and felt as if something had fallen into place. "Yeah, that feels better," he admitted. 

Tron nodded. "Your bodysuit will protect you from incidental cuts when handling your disc, so unless someone deliberately slams it into your hand, you should keep your fingers," he said with a slight smile. "Your disc will also react to you when within a certain radius of you in free flight, dulling the edge. Only if someone else is able to activate your disc can you be injured by it. This is why most combatants stick to using their own disc." 

"That's rare, right?" Sam asked. "Being able to use someone else's disc?" 

"It's more likely to happen between programs who share code, and with complex programs, but yes. It's rare." 

"Then I'm not gonna worry about it," Sam said firmly. "Just show me how to throw this thing." 

"Anyone can _throw_ one of these 'things'," Tron said bluntly. "I'm going to teach you how to _use_ it." 

* * *

Two hours later, Shaddox himself turned up at the mouth of the ravine. Sam didn't notice him at first, too involved in the precise muscle control that guided the disc to the target. It felt like learning martial arts; throwing a disc didn't just require the arm to move, it needed the impetus of his entire body to give it extra power and distance. As he aimed for the rocky outcrop that Tron had designated the 'target' for what seemed to be the hundredth time, a deep voice rang out. 

"Tron, how's he doing?"

Instead of answering, Tron scooped a rock up from the ground and hurled it at Sam. Sam slid aside and threw his disc in one slightly awkward movement, the circular blade missing the airborne stone by less than a foot. The rock itself thumped to earth where Sam had been standing, missing him by an equal amount. 

"Not bad, for a beginner," Shaddox said approvingly. "It's time to go; the satellites are due on the horizon in twenty minutes." 

Re-docking his disc in a move that was nearly as smooth as Tron's after all the practice, Sam followed Shaddox out of the ravine and towards the overhang that shielded the access to the tunnels. Only half a dozen or so people were still above ground, armed with spades and scraping out any hint of boots. Sam thought of the accuracy than satellites in his own time were capable of, and grinned dryly in appreciation. These guys took care of everything.

* * *

In the crowded cavern, the space around Sam and Tron was obvious enough to make the back of Sam's neck itch. He kept catching covert glances in his peripheral vision, hearing hushed whispers that he couldn't quite make out. It was possible that Tron _could_ understand them, though, the stoic, stone-like mask expression on his face utterly different from the one he'd worn while training. Neither said anything as they focused on their food, lunch that afternoon actually holding recognizable components. 

Sam suspected that the curious would have left them alone if there had been someone they recognized sitting with them. Unfortunately for their prospective trial by rumor, Shaddox been intercepted by another disc warrior almost as soon as they'd entered the main dining cavern. Shaddox had listened for a moment, and then made a brief, distracted apology before he and the red-headed woman had hurried to the exit. 

Sam twitched as the susurrus of sound increased slightly in volume, digging his scratched fork savagely into his meal. The first person to actually _try _something was going to regret it.__

__"Tron? Sam Flynn?"_ _

__"Yeah? What's _your_ problem?" Sam snarled, hand going to his hip for the gun he no longer carried as he twisted to face the owner of the voice. _ _

__It was the blond man from a the day before, whose daughter had come to them for help. He smiled and held up his hands to show that all they held was one of the crude baked-clay plates and a mug of clean water that had a faded Lakers logo on it. "No problem. I just wanted to thank you both for helping Bethany find me."_ _

__The reversal stole any words that Sam had been about to spit out. Tron's face eased into a more pleasant expression, stepping in to take up the slack as easily as he did in combat._ _

__"I'm glad we could help. How is she?"_ _

__"She's fine," the man said, his eyes softening affectionately. "Probably running the daycare staff ragged again." He slid into the empty space beside Tron, putting his crockery down on the table in a clear indication that he didn't intend to move. "I'm Neil, by the way."_ _

__"Daycare? Can't her mom look after her?" Sam asked, voice still a little gruff as his hackles began to settle._ _

__"Her mom died when she was less than a year old," Neil said evenly. "Bethy's the only family I have left."_ _

__"Oh. Uh. Sorry." Anger at having made a fool of himself fought with new-born sympathy, and left him feeling vaguely embarrassed._ _

__"Is that a . . . common situation, here?" Tron asked carefully, rescuing the conversation once again._ _

__Neil stuffed a bite of mashed vegetables in his mouth and chewed it for a minute, not looking at either of them. "Yeah," he said eventually. "I don't know anybody here that hasn't lost someone to the MCP and its programs."_ _

__Taking the hint, Sam and Tron reapplied themselves to the remains of their dinner._ _

__* * *_ _

__That afternoon, Anon guided them to another cavern, one nearly the size of the one where they'd eaten lunch. This had to be the 'inside cavern' that Gibson had mentioned, but the combatants here didn't seem to be the ones he'd seen out in the sunlight that morning. Among the groups warming up was a familiar blond; Neil looked up, giving them a brief wave before focusing back on the exercises._ _

__"Are we joining these guys now?" Sam asked their silent guide, unable to keep the challenge out of his voice._ _

__Anon, apparently unperturbed, simply shook his head and pointed to a corner where a thick rag rug was laid out. Apparently this was the hand-to-hand class. It made sense; in a limited space like this, nobody would want to risk a disc going wild._ _

__Once Sam got used to the attention-grabbing sight of the rainbow of moving lights limning the combatants' bodies, his attention wandered to the sides of the cave. More pallets and sleeping bags crowded against the walls, and Sam remembered with a strange kind of clarity the way Gibson had mentioned the 'early birds'._ _

__The rag rug shifted underfoot as Sam stepped onto it, but it would be kinder to fall on than the bare rock of the cavern floor if – _when_ – Tron demonstrated a new technique by using it to topple Sam off his feet. Sam still had bruises from when Tron had been teaching him in the cell . . . had that really been only yesterday? _ _

__Sam shook his head slightly, pushing the thought aside. He'd been expecting to be attacked as soon as he stepped onto the rug, since that had been Tron's method up until now, and the _wait_ now was almost worse than being lunged at. Growling, Sam finally took up the offense and swung at Tron. _ _

__The takedown that he'd expected happened then, Tron side-stepping out of the way and grabbing his arm to propel him forward and _down_. "You telegraph your moves," Tron growled at him from above. "If I'd really been fighting you, you'd be dead now." _ _

__Sam snarled as he thrust himself back to his feet. With Tron around, weight and strength and intimidation meant nothing, and those were the three things that Billy Darley had most relied on. "So how do I fix it, huh? You fucking tell me that!"_ _

__"I will." Tron paced forward a couple of steps, reaching out to lay a hand against Sam's chest. "This is where your movements show first . . ."_ _

__It took several tries, but Sam finally got a nod of approval from Tron. To Sam's surprise, he felt a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth in return, warmth unexpectedly unfurling in his chest._ _

__Then his feet were swept out from under him, and Sam hit the floor once again. Instinctively, he kicked out, foot slamming into armored flesh. As he did so, he grabbed the rug and yanked._ _

__Tron went with the fall, flipping over on his fingertips and calmly coming to rest back on his feet. "You're cheating." he accused. Sam looked up, ready to snarl that cheating was what won fights, and was stopped cold by the smile on Tron's face. "Good."_ _

___Huh_ , thought the part of him that had grown up as Billy. _It's almost like he means it . . .__ _

__Oh._ _

___Sam_ , as new and young and unformed as he was, had been shown honest reactions from the first. Tron's belief in him, Alan's hope for him, Quorra's distrust of him, Roy's disappointment, Ram's reassurance, Gibson's snark, Shaddox's determination . . . _ _

__All true. All _real_. Did that mean that this approval, now, was real as well? It wasn't the offhand 'good job' thrown at him by Bones Darley when a deal went well, nor the fawning assurance of his gang or people he had power over. These few days of this new life, as incredible and futuristic and post-apocalyptic as anything in a sci-fi movie, already felt more genuine than all the years he'd lived as Billy Darley. The past felt like a nightmare he'd woken from. And what did that say about him, that he'd been comfortable in that world for so long? _ _

__"Good, huh?" Sam challenged as he rolled to his feet._ _

__"Yes. Good." Faint mischief lit Tron's eyes, something that he wouldn't have seen unless he'd been looking for it. "But I want you to do better."_ _

__Sam scowled, mostly for show, and dropped into the 'ready' position once again._ _

__* * *_ _

__By the end of the third day of disc training, Sam could reliably knock the rocks Tron threw out of the way. By the end of the fifth, he could dodge the powered-down sting of one of Tron's discs. After the sixth, Tron was using both and no longer holding back on his speed or accuracy._ _

__"Not bad, Sam Flynn," said a cool voice from behind him._ _

__Sam startled for a second, managed to duck the oncoming disc anyway, and leapfrogged over a fallen boulder. Flinging his hand up to catch his returning disc without bothering to look, Sam heard Tron's deep chuckle._ _

__"Quorra," Tron said in greeting, the whistle of his twin discs ending in two quick snatches. "Pause, Sam."_ _

__Then, and only then, did Sam slot his disc into dock and emerge from behind his impromptu shelter. Quorra was leaning against the near-vertical rock wall at the entrance to the small ravine, arms crossed, her body language betraying more tension than the casual pose suggested._ _

__"Didn't expect to see you here, Q," Sam drawled, moving to stand next to Tron. He saw Quorra's eyes flick between them, a slight smile on her face, and wondered why._ _

__"I came to see how you were progressing," she said with a shrug. "Shaddox gives me reports, but there's nothing like seeing in person. You're no worse than some of my other soldiers."_ _

__"Wow, thanks," Sam said, an edge of sarcasm to it._ _

__Quorra's voice took on a touch more frost. "If you hadn't been up to standard, we'd have left you behind. It's Tron we need, not you."_ _

__"Fortunately," said a far more cheerful voice, "you _are_ good enough." Ram came around the corner, standing close beside Quorra, and some of the strain in her eyes faded as he did so. _ _

___You two are together, huh?_ Sam thought, a smirk beginning to curl the corners of his lips. _So the Ice Queen does have a human side.__ _

__Quorra uncrossed her arms as she stood up straight, recapturing Sam's attention. "There's a meeting tonight, after dinner. I want you and Tron there."_ _

__Sam tensed again, feeling Tron's hand clamp down on his shoulder. The firm squeeze startled him just enough to silence the response hovering on the edge of being said. "We'll be there," Tron said calmly._ _

__Ram nodded. "Great. Okay, it's time to go in."_ _

__Sam and Tron trailed behind the other pair. As they approached the other fighters, Quorra flagged Anon over as Ram went to speak with the group in training. A quick glance back showed seven of the disc warriors clustered around Quorra, her dark cap of hair hard to see past the heads of the listening men and women._ _

__"What was that about?" Sam asked one of the disc warriors as they descended into the cool darkness of the caverns._ _

__The woman shrugged, her gloved hands finding the handholds with the ease of long practice. "They're the lightjet squadron, or what's left of them. Guess Quorra wants to give them a heads up."_ _

__"Wait, you have jets?" Sam asked, startled._ _

__She grinned back at him, flipping her short-cut hair out of her eyes with a practiced shake of her head. "Sure. Don't use 'em much, they're easier to see than the bikes, but everybody knows there's _something_ going down soon. If she's calling up the jet pilots, it's big." _ _

__"Huh." He thought about that as his foot found the cave floor instead of another toehold. "Guess that makes sense. So what do you do?"_ _

__"Heavy cavalry," she said dryly. "I have one of the weaponized lightcycles." She almost looked as if she wanted to continue, then closed her mouth on it._ _

__"So, you handle the big guns?" Sam asked teasingly, almost by reflex._ _

__She laughed, free and easy. "Sure. Any kind." Her shoulder bumped his. "Did you know that there's a two-hour window at night when it's safe to go out? The stars are really clear, this deep in the desert."_ _

__The offer of intimacy was open, blatant, and Sam wasn't sure why it was doing nothing for him. Two weeks ago, he'd have taken her up on the suggestion without hesitation – she was cute, especially when she smiled. "I think I'll be too busy sleeping. Tron's been wearing me out in training, you know?"_ _

__She shrugged, a hint of surprise in her face rapidly overtaken by comprehension. "Okay. Well, if you find yourself awake some night, I'm Mara."_ _

__"I'll remember," he said with a nod._ _

__She separated quickly from him after that, three tall young men catching up with her and chatting about the training session. He and Tron shared a quiet, amused look as they hung back a little to let the group pass._ _

__"Is now a good time to ask what Star Wars is?" Tron asked with an upward twitch of one eyebrow._ _

__Sam winced faintly as he remembered his earlier promise. "Yeah, sure. Okay, it starts with this guy called Luke Skywalker . . ."_ _


End file.
